Born in Newton, Massachusetts to a literary family, he was the son of Algonquin Round Table founder, Robert Benchley.

Nathaniel 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" that recounts the experiences of a sixteen-year-old Danish boy during the German occupation of his country in World War II or "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 peoples'.

Film director/producer, Norman Jewison made Benchley's 1962 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.

His son, Peter Benchley, also became a writer best known for the book and screenplay for the 1975 film, Jaws.

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) The Off-Islanders (1962) 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)

Partial bibliography, novels: