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.

First published in February 1974, Jaws was a great success; the hardback remained on the bestseller list for 44 weeks and the subsequent paperback edition sold millions of copies, beginning in 1975.

Although literary critics acknowledged the novel's effective suspense, reviews were generally mixed, with many finding Benchley's prose and characterizations amateurish and banal.

Jaws is set in the fictional town of Amity, a small, seaside resort located on the south shore of Long Island, halfway between Bridgehampton and East Hampton.

One night, after making love with a man on the beach, a young woman named Christine Watkins skinny dips alone in the ocean where she is attacked and killed by a massive great white shark.

Both the boy's mother and Gardner's widow angrily blame Brody for the deaths by not closing the beaches after they learn of the earlier attack on Chrissie Watkins.

After a teenage boy narrowly escapes another attack near the shore, Brody again closes the beaches and convinces the town's selectmen to hire Quint, an eccentric, crusty professional fisherman, to find and kill the shark.

Upon seeing the fish for the first time and estimating the shark to be at least 20 ft (6.1 m) in length and weighing in at roughly 5,000 lb (2,300 kg), Hooper is visibly excited and in awe at the size of it.

The lone survivor of the ordeal, Brody watches as the dead shark spirals down and disappears into the depths; he then begins to paddle back to shore on his makeshift float.

"[3] This interest grew greater after reading a 1964 news story about fisherman Frank Mundus catching a great white shark weighing 4,550 pounds (2,060 kg) off the shore of Montauk, New York.

[8][9] Benchley procrastinated finishing the novel and only began writing in earnest once his agent reminded him that if he did not deliver the manuscript, he would have to return the $7,500 writer's advance.

Following Bacon's basic concept, Kastel illustrated his favorite part of the novel, the opening where the shark attacks Christine Watkins.

For research, Kastel went to the American Museum of Natural History, and took advantage of the Great White exhibits being closed for cleaning to photograph the models.

Following a photoshoot for Good Housekeeping, Kastel requested the model he was photographing to lie on a stool in the approximate position of a front crawl.

[11] The oil-on-board painting Kastel created for the cover would eventually be reused by Universal Pictures for the film posters and advertising, albeit slightly bowdlerized with the woman's naked body partially obscured with more sea foam.

[14] Along with a carnivorous killer on the sea, Amity is populated with equally predatory humans: the mayor who has ties with the Mafia, a depressed, adulterous housewife and criminals among the tourists.

[15] The novel contained 1970s cultural themes of a frayed marriage, a financially strapped town and distrust of the local government, in an era when divorces were on the rise, unemployment was high, and the presidential scandal of Nixon.

[16] In the meantime, the impact of the predatory deaths resemble Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, with the mayor of a small town panicking over how a problem will drive away the tourists.

[17][18][19] The central character, Chief Brody, fits a common characterization of the disaster genre, an authority figure who is forced to provide guidance to those affected by the sudden tragedy.

[12] Focusing on a working class local leads the book's prose to describe the beachgoers with contempt, and Brody to have conflicts with the rich outsider Hooper.

A French translation, Les Dents de la Mer, read by Pascal Casanova was released exclusively by Audible Studios in downloadable format in 2018.

"[28] Steven Spielberg shared the sentiment, saying he initially found many of the characters unsympathetic and wanted the shark to "win", a characterization he changed in the film adaptation.

Time reviewer John Skow described the novel as "cliché and crude literary calculation", where events "refuse to take on life and momentum" and the climax "lacks only Queequeg's coffin to resemble a bath tub version of Moby-Dick.

"[29] An article in The Listener criticized the plot, stating the "novel only has bite, so to say, at feed time," and these scenes are "naïve attempts at whipping along a flagging story-line.

John Spurling of the New Statesman asserted that while the "characterisation of the humans is fairly rudimentary", the shark "is done with exhilarating and alarming skill, and every scene in which it appears is imagined at a special pitch of intensity.

[36] After securing the rights, Steven Spielberg, who was making his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck, Brown and Universal, was hired as the director.

[39] For the adaptation, Spielberg wanted to preserve the novel's basic concept while removing Benchley's subplots and altering the characterizations, having found all of the characters of the book unlikable.

[40] Quint became a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster,[41] and changing the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion.

[40] Amity was also relocated; while scouting the book's Long Island setting, Brown found it "too grand" and not fitting the idea of "a vacation area that was lower middle class enough so that an appearance of a shark would destroy the tourist business."

[46] According to Benchley, once when his payment of the adaptation-related royalties didn't arrive as expected, he called his agent and she informed him that the studio was arranging a deal for sequels.