Nathaniel Benchley - Writing Career

Writing Career

Benchley was the highly-respected author of many children's/juvenile books that provided learning for the youthful readers with stories of various animals or through the book's historical settings. Benchley dealt with diverse locales and topics such as "Bright Candles", which recounts the experiences of a 16-year-old Danish boy during the German occupation of his country in World War II; and "Small Wolf", a story about a Native American boy who meets white men on the island of Manhattan and learns that their ideas about land are different from those of his own people.

He wrote a biography of his father Robert in 1955. His first novel Sail a Crooked Ship (1960) was filmed by Columbia Pictures in 1961. Film director/producer, Norman Jewison made Benchley's 1961 novel The Off-Islanders into a motion picture titled The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for which he received the nomination for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. He was a close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart and wrote his biography in 1975.

Benchley's novel Welcome to Xanadu was made into the 1975 motion picture Sweet Hostage.

His elder son, Peter Benchley (1940–2006), was a writer best known for writing the novel Jaws and the screenplay of the 1975 Steven Spielberg film made from it. His younger son, Nat Benchley, is a writer and actor who has portrayed his grandfather, Robert Benchley, in a one-man, semi-biographical stage show, "Benchley Despite Himself". The show was a compilation of Robert Benchley's best monologues, short films, radio rantings and pithy pieces as recalled, edited, and acted by his grandson Nat, and combined with family reminiscences and friends' perspectives."

Nathaniel Benchley died in 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts and was interred in the family plot at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket.

Partial bibliography, children/juvenile books:

• Sinbad the Sailor (1960)
• Red Fox and His Canoe (1964)
• Oscar Otter (1966)
• The Strange Disappearance of Arthur Cluck (1967)
• Ghost Named Fred (1968)
• Sam the Minuteman (1969)
• The Several Tricks of Edgar Dolphin (1970)
• Feldman Fieldmouse: A Fable (1971)
• The Magic Sled (1972)
• Small Wolf (1972)
• Only Earth and Sky Last Forever (1972)
• The Deep Dives of Stanley Whale (1973)
• Bright Candles: A Novel of the Danish Resistance (1974)
• Beyond the Mists (1975)
• Snorri and the Strangers (1976)
• Kilroy and the Gull (1977)
• George the Drummer Boy (1977)
• Running Owl the Hunter (1979)
• Walter, the Homing Pigeon (1981)
• Welcome to Xanadu (1968)

Partial bibliography, novels (unless otherwise noted):

• Robert Benchley: A Biography(1955)
• Sail a Crooked Ship (1960)
• The Off-Islanders (1961)
• Catch a Falling Spy (1964)
• A Winter's Tale (1964)
• The Visitors (1965)
• The Monument (1966)
• Welcome to Xanadu (1968)
• The Wake of the Icarus (1969)
• Lassiter's Folly (1971)
• A Necessary End: A Novel of World War II (1976)
• Sweet Anarchy (1979)
• Portrait of a Scoundrel (1979)
• All Over Again (1981)
• Speakeasy (1982)

Partial bibliography, short stories:

• "Short cut" The New Yorker 25/49 (28 January 1950) : 26-29