Philip Robert Benjamin, reporter, novelist, and poet, was born 15 November 1922 in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Victor and Dorothy (Chausky) Benjamin. He spent his boyhood years in Indianapolis, Indiana, but later moved with his family to New York City. From 1943 to 1946, he served with an air-sea rescue unit of the United States Army Air Force. While in the Army, some of his poetry was published in Yank, an Army magazine. In 1947, Benjamin received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the City College of New York and commenced work for the New York Times, first as an office boy and later as an editorial indexer, and finally as a reporter. He married Lois Regensburg in 1955. They had two sons, Anthony Scott and Roger Blerkom.
As a reporter, Benjamin traveled throughout the United States and much of the world. He reported on the Little Rock, Arkansas school integration crisis in 1954, and served as the Times correspondent in Antarctica in 1958-1959 and 1960, and in the same capacity in London in 1965. He also reported on a wide variety of New York City topics ranging from politics through crime and business. His articles were characteristically witty and humorous. Benjamin belonged to the Overseas Press Club and was a member of the executive board of the Newspaper Guild of New York.
Benjamin's trips to Antarctica formed the basis for his novel, Quick, Before It Melts, published in 1964 by Random House. The novel was later made into a play and a motion picture [1964, MGM], both of which received excellent reviews. In 1965, Benjamin resigned from the Times to devote his attention to another book, about the Caribbean. While completing this manuscript, Benjamin became suddenly ill, and died after abdominal surgery on 18 April 1966.
