page_title: Rachel Carson
section_title: Early career and publications
hierarchical_section_title: Rachel Carson / Life and work / Early career and publications
caption_attribution_description: English: Rachel Carson conducts Marine Biology Research with Bob Hines — in the Atlantic (1952).
context_page_description: Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
  Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.
  Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially some problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was the book Silent Spring, which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides.
context_section_description: At the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Carson's main responsibilities were to analyze and report field data on fish populations, and to write brochures and other literature for the public. Using her research and consultations with marine biologists as starting points, she also wrote a steady stream of articles for The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers. However, her family responsibilities further increased in January 1937 when her older sister died, leaving Carson as the sole breadwinner for her mother and two nieces.
  In July 1937, the Atlantic Monthly accepted a revised version of an essay, The World of Waters, that she originally wrote for her first fisheries bureau brochure. Her supervisor had deemed it too good for that purpose. The essay, published as Undersea, was a vivid narrative of a journey along the ocean floor. It marked a major turning point in Carson's writing career. Publishing house Simon & Schuster, impressed by Undersea, contacted Carson and suggested that she expand it into a book. Several years of writing resulted in Under the Sea Wind (1941), which received excellent reviews but sold poorly. In the meantime, Carson's article-writing success continued—her features appeared in Sun Magazine, Nature, and Collier's. Carson attempted to leave the Bureau (by then transformed into the United States Fish and Wildlife Service) in 1945, but few jobs for naturalists were available, as most money for science was focused on technical fields in the wake of the Manhattan Project. In mid-1945, Carson first encountered the subject of DDT, a revolutionary new pesticide—lauded as the "insect bomb" after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that was only beginning to undergo tests for safety and ecological effects. DDT was but one of Carson's many writing interests at the time, and editors found the subject unappealing; she published nothing on DDT until 1962.
  Carson rose within the Fish and Wildlife Service, by 1945 supervising a small writing staff and in 1949 becoming chief editor of publications. Though her position provided increasing opportunities for fieldwork and freedom in choosing her writing projects, it also entailed increasingly tedious administrative responsibilities. By 1948, Carson was working on material for a second book and had made the conscious decision to begin a transition to writing full-time. That year, she took on a literary agent, Marie Rodell; they formed a close professional relationship that would last the rest of Carson's career.
  Oxford University Press expressed interest in Carson's book proposal for a life history of the ocean, spurring her to complete by early 1950 the manuscript of what would become The Sea Around Us. Chapters appeared in Science Digest and The Yale Review—the latter chapter, "The Birth of an Island", winning the American Association for the Advancement of Science's George Westinghouse Science Writing Prize. Nine chapters were serialized in The New Yorker beginning June 1951 and the book was published July 2, 1951, by Oxford University Press. The Sea Around Us remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 86 weeks, was abridged by Reader's Digest, won the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Burroughs Medal, and resulted in Carson's being awarded two honorary doctorates. She also licensed a documentary film based on it. The Sea's success led to the republication of Under the Sea Wind, which became a bestseller itself. With success came financial security, and in 1952 Carson was able to give up her job in order to concentrate on writing full-time.
  Carson was inundated with speaking engagements, fan mail and other correspondence regarding The Sea Around Us, along with work on the  script that she had secured the right to review. She was very unhappy with the final version of the script by writer, director and producer Irwin Allen; she found it untrue to the atmosphere of the book and scientifically embarrassing, describing it as "a cross between a believe-it-or-not and a breezy travelogue." She discovered, however, that her right to review the sc
caption: Rachel Carson and Bob Hines conducting research off the Atlantic coast in 1952
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