Before Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote radio scripts about fish for the government
In the depths of the Depression, a young zoologist supporting her mother took a temporary job writing 52 seven-minute radio shows about underwater life for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. That assignment launched Rachel Carson as a writer, and nearly three decades later her Silent Spring would turn national pesticide policy around.
Carson was born on 27 May 1907 on a 65-acre farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, beside the Allegheny River. She published her first story at ten in St. Nicholas Magazine and grew up on Beatrix Potter, Melville and Conrad. At the Pennsylvania College for Women she switched from English to biology, then spent a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, her first long encounter with the sea. She earned a master's in zoology at Johns Hopkins in 1932 but had to abandon her doctorate to earn money.
Her father died in 1935 and her older sister in 1937, leaving Carson to provide for her mother and two nieces. She topped the civil service exam and in 1936 became only the second woman hired as a full-time professional by the fisheries bureau. A brochure essay her boss judged too good for a pamphlet ran in the Atlantic Monthly as Undersea and led to her first book, Under the Sea Wind, in 1941, which reviewers loved and few bought. She first came across DDT in 1945 but found no editor interested.
The Sea Around Us, published in July 1951, spent 86 weeks among The New York Times bestsellers and won the National Book Award, finally letting her quit her job in 1952. Its film version, made by Irwin Allen, won the 1953 Oscar for best documentary, yet Carson thought it scientifically embarrassing and never sold film rights again. The Edge of the Sea completed her ocean trilogy in 1955.
In 1957 a niece died, and Carson adopted her orphaned five-year-old son. Silent Spring appeared in 1962; chemical companies fought it bitterly, but it prompted a nationwide ban on DDT and helped inspire the Environmental Protection Agency. She died in April 1964 and was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Source: Rachel Carson
