Rachel Carson

American · 1907 to 1964

Born Rachel Louise Carson on May 27, 1907, on a sixty-five-acre family farm above the Allegheny River near Springdale, Pennsylvania, to an insurance salesman and a former schoolteacher who read aloud to her from Beatrix Potter and Gene Stratton-Porter, she published her first story at the age of ten in St. Nicholas Magazine. She went up to the Pennsylvania College for Women in 1925 to study English and switched to biology after a single course shook her into a different vocation. A summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole gave her the sea. She took her master's in zoology at Johns Hopkins in 1932 and entered the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries the next year, the second woman ever hired by the agency for a permanent professional post. By day she wrote government pamphlets; by night she wrote the books that became her sea trilogy. Under the Sea-Wind (1941) sank without trace; The Sea Around Us (1951) sat on the New York Times bestseller list for eighty-six weeks and won the National Book Award. The Edge of the Sea (1955) closed the cycle. Then she turned to the DDT spraying programs that were silencing the songbirds outside her Maryland window. Silent Spring (1962), researched while she was already dying of breast cancer, drew the open warfare of the chemical industry and the support of President Kennedy's science advisory committee. It led to the banning of DDT and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. She died on April 14, 1964, at fifty-six, of a heart attack hastened by her illness, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter.