Mario Francis Puzo was an American author and screenwriter. He wrote crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and for Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film and its 1980 sequel. His final novel, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001.
Bethany Meilani Hamilton is an American professional surfer and writer who survived a 2003 shark attack in which her left arm was bitten off and who ultimately returned to professional surfing. She wrote about her experience in the 2004 autobiography, Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board, which was adapted into the 2011 feature film, Soul Surfer, in which she attributes her strength to her Christian faith. Hamilton was also the subject of a 2018 documentary, Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable, which discusses her marriage to Adam Dirks and how marriage and motherhood have affected her professional surfing career.
Richard Preston is a writer for The New Yorker and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction.
David Levithan is an American young adult fiction author and editor. He has written numerous works featuring strong male gay characters, most notably Boy Meets Boy and Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. Six of Levithan's books have won or been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature, making him the most celebrated author in the category.
Peter Bradford Benchley was an American author, screenwriter, and ocean activist. He is known for his bestselling novel Jaws and co-wrote its film adaptation with Carl Gottlieb. Several more of his works were also adapted for both cinema and television, including The Deep, The Island, Beast, and White Shark.
The Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 were a series of shark attacks along the coast of New Jersey, in the United States, between July 1 and 12, 1916, in which four people were killed and one critically injured. The incidents occurred during a deadly summer heat wave and polio epidemic in the United States that drove thousands of people to the seaside resorts of the Jersey Shore. Since 1916, scholars have debated which shark species was responsible and the number of animals involved, with the great white shark and the bull shark most frequently cited.
James John Patrick Murphy was an American author. He wrote more than 35 nonfiction and fiction books for children, young adults, and general audiences, including more than 30 about American history. He won the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2010 for his contribution in writing for teens.
12 Days of Terror is a 2004 television film directed by Jack Sholder and starring Colin Egglesfield, Mark Dexter, Jenna Harrison and John Rhys-Davies. Based on a true story, it revolves around the 1916 Jersey shark attacks, as recounted in the book of the same name by Richard Fernicola, in which a juvenile great white shark begins a series of attacks that takes place of the course of 12 days in New Jersey. On 1 May 2004, it premiered on Animal Planet and later on the Discovery Channel.
Jim Dwyer was an American journalist and author. He was a reporter and columnist with The New York Times, and the author or co-author of six non-fiction books. A native New Yorker, Dwyer wrote columns for New York Newsday and the New York Daily News before joining the Times. He appeared in the 2012 documentary film Central Park Five and was portrayed on stage in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy (2013). Dwyer had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his "compelling and compassionate columns about New York City" and was also a member of the New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer for spot news reporting for coverage of a subway derailment in Manhattan.
Engleside Hotel was one of the most decorative and beautiful Victorian hotels that once stood on Engleside Avenue in Beach Haven, New Jersey, United States. It was completed by the start of the 1876 summer season, under the leadership of Robert Engle, and it quickly became one of the most popular resorts on Long Beach Island, along with the Baldwin Hotel located nearby.
Alan Zweibel is an American television writer, author, playwright, and screenwriter whom TheNew York Times says has “earned a place in the pantheon of American pop culture." An original Saturday Night Live writer, Zweibel has won five Emmy Awards and two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work in television, which includes It's Garry Shandling's Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Jaws is a novel by American writer Peter Benchley, published in 1974. It tells the story of a large great white shark that preys upon a small Long Island resort town and the three men who attempt to kill it. The novel grew out of Benchley's interest in shark attacks after he learned about the exploits of Montauk, New York shark fisherman Frank Mundus in 1964. Doubleday commissioned him to write the novel in 1971, a period when Benchley worked as a freelance journalist.
Twelve Days of Terror: A Definitive Investigation of the 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks is a non-fiction book by Richard G. Fernicola about the Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916. The book was published in 2001 by Lyons Press.
Francis Augustus Bender was an autodidact forensic artist and fine artist. He made facial reconstructions of the dead based on their skeletons, and of fugitives based on outdated photographs, with his reconstructions showing how they might look in the present day. He primarily worked in clay and then cast his pieces into plaster and painted them, but he also created age-progression drawings of fugitives using pastels. His most famous facial reconstruction case was that of murderer John Emil List, who, after decades as a fugitive under a false identity, was captured a few days after Bender's bust of him was featured on America's Most Wanted.
Michael Capuzzo is an American journalist and author best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books The Murder Room and Close to Shore He was formerly a reporter with the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he received four Pulitzer Prize nominations. The Murder Room, the true story of a private dining club of famous detectives who solve cold murders, and Close to Shore, an historic thriller and recreation of the first American shark attack in World War I-era New Jersey, both enjoyed wide acclaim from critics and authors such as Gay Talese, Mark Bowden, John Sanford, and Michael Connelly.
Lauren Tarshis is an American author of children's books, with several series of fiction, non-fiction and historical fiction works found in thousands of libraries and translated into several languages.
Amy Hill Hearth is an American journalist and author who focuses on uniquely American stories and perspectives from the past. She is the author or co-author of eleven books, beginning in 1993 with the oral history Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, a New York Times bestseller for 117 weeks, according to its archives. The book was adapted for Broadway in 1995 and for a film in 1999.
Representations of the shark are common in popular culture in the Western world, with a range of media generally portraying them of eating machines and threats. In some media, however, comedy is drawn from portrayals of sharks running counter to their popular image, with shark characters being portrayed as unexpectedly friendly or otherwise comical. The lists below give an approximate sample of the many forms of representation of the shark in popular culture.
The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks is a non-fiction book about great white sharks by Canadian born journalist Susan Casey. The text was initially published by Henry Holt and Company on June 7, 2005.
Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark is a memoir written by Greg Skomal that chronicles his decades long career as an Atlantic shark researcher. It was published in July 2023 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Ret Talbot, a science writer and independent journalist, co-authored this book. Talbot collaborated with Skomal so that the book would appeal to a general audience. The goal for Skomal is to educate and share insights with readers about the Great white shark.
