![]() The residence included a nicely appointed home office, but McCullough preferred to write in a glorified garden shed in his back yard. David McCullough lived in a beautiful white-shingled house in West Tisbury, on Martha’s Vineyard. ![]() ![]() No writing desk was necessary she’d instead work lying across the bed, once explaining to George Plimpton, in an interview, how this habit led one of her elbows to become “absolutely encrusted” with calluses. She’d arrive at six-thirty in the morning, with a Bible, a yellow pad, and a bottle of sherry. Maya Angelou, for example, would rent hotel rooms to write, asking the staff to remove all artwork from the walls and enter each day only to empty the wastebaskets. “Bang! Bang! Bang!-and it didn’t bother him.”īenchley isn’t the only author to abandon a charming home to work nearby in objectively worse conditions. Years later, Wendy Benchley still remembered the noise: “He had a desk right in the middle of this place where they were making furnaces,” she said. As John McPhee revealed, in an essay in the magazine last month, he remembers Benchley during these years working in a “rented space in the back of a furnace factory.” A little digging, aided by the Hopewell Valley Historical Society, clarifies that it was Pennington Furnace Supply, Inc., situated on Brookside Avenue, off the north end of Pennington’s Main Street. It was only recently that I learned, to my dismay, that Benchley didn’t actually write “Jaws” in his bucolic Pennington home. As a kid, doing homework in my attic bedroom, I sometimes liked to imagine that Benchley had looked out over a similar lawn down the street, crafting his iconic scenes. Their home was a classic converted carriage house on a sizable property, framed by conifers. I’ve long been familiar with the connection between “ Jaws” and Pennington because I grew up down the street from the house that the Benchleys had bought. It was here that Benchley got to work on his first novel, a sensationalist tale of a great white shark terrorizing a beach town. They considered Princeton, New Jersey, but couldn’t afford it, so they settled for Pennington, a small community eight miles to the west. In the late nineteen-sixties, the writer Peter Benchley and his wife, Wendy, were looking for a quiet place to live near New York City.
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