Pathfinder
WOMEN

Romantic biography
of the ocean

**Rachel L. Carson**, author of *The Sea Around Us*, one of the most stirring and beautifully created books of our time, never saw the sea until she left home in Springdale, Pa., to go to college, to study writing.

The sea had fascinated her as long
as she could remember, but she never
intended to plumb it academically—until
she was forced into a biology course.
There, to her surprise, she was trapped
by her own enthusiasm. Heroically, she
laid away all thoughts of becoming a
writer, got a master's degree in zoology
and began to teach premedical students.

Only some years later did she re-
alize that what she still wanted most was
to write and that her knowledge of
zoology provided the subject matter.

During the depression, the U.S.
Bureau of Fisheries hired her part-time
to write radio scripts. Most were so good
the bureau decided they should be edited
into a book and Miss Carson should do
the introduction. When her chief read
her piece, however, he said it wouldn't do.
Write another, he told her, winking, and
send this one to the *Atlantic Monthly*.

**Accepted Reject.** The *Atlantic* published the introduction as a four-page essay entitled *Under Sea*. Simon & Schuster, the book publishers read it and immediately dispatched a question to Miss Carson: Had she ever thought of writing a book? She hadn't but soon did. Three years later, in 1941, *Under the Sea Wind* was published. It was a book about fish, shore birds and animals.

Meantime, Miss Carson had acquired
a writing post at the U.S. Fish and Wild-
life Service (she now is editor-in-chief).
With World War II, information about
the ocean became vital and new findings
pourred out of laboratories in prodigious
amounts. Miss Carson kept abreast.

And now she has told what she
learned. *The Sea Around Us* (Oxford
University Press: $3.50) is the first book
to include the new knowledge of the
ocean, gathered during and since the

war. A scientifically accurate biography
of the water that covers three fourths
of our globe, her book sweeps from the
beginning of time to the era when man
no longer will exist to record or imagine.
"In its mysterious past [the sea] en-
compasses all the dim origins of life,"
Miss Carson writes, "and receives in the
end, after, it may be, many transmuta-
tions, the dead husks of that same life.
For all at last return to the sea—to
Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-
flowing stream of time, the beginning and
the end."

**Salutes Before Sales.** By last
week, on the eve of the book's publica-
tion, all the chapters but one already
had been reprinted or condensed in
periodicals as varied as the *New Yorker*,
*Nature Magazine*, *Vogue* and the *Yale
Review*. A Swedish translation and an

**Pathfinder**

*Biographer Carson. She probed the seas' depth and breadth. (SEE: Ocean)*

English edition were in the mill. In-
quiries were coming from many other
foreign countries. And in America *The*
Sea* had been chosen as an upcoming
selection for Book-of-the-Month readers.

At her home in Silver Spring, Md.,
Miss Carson, a quietly taut, fragile-look-
ing woman, reflected on her success. "It's
very good luck," she said. Then quickly,
she stepped to a bookcase and picked up
a small shell.

"This is a limpet," she said, "a key-
hole limpet, a southern species. See the
tiny hole in the top? A limpet lives where
the surf is extremely heavy. It clamps
down tight on a rock. Inside it has a
kind of snail-like body. It's believed it
secretes an acid that eats away the rock,
leaving a depression the shape of its
shell. Now," she continued, "hundreds of
limpets may live on one rock. And when
the tide is down they begin to move,
grazing like a little herd of cattle, on
slimy moss-like plants. But when the
water gets rough, all the limpets go
home again. And each, by some instinct,
goes back to his own little scar."

**Book III.** The limpet and a host of other creatures that live by the sea will be the characters in Miss Carson's next book. On leave from her job with Guggenheim Fellowship backing, Miss Carson will spend the rest of the summer researching along the Atlantic Coast. "This will be a practical handbook you take to the beach," she says. "It will help you to see things you might not notice."

V Kirkus Bulletin
N. City

JUN 1 1951

Carson, Rachel

THE SEA AROUND US

Oxford
$3.50

* A wonderfully effective little volume about the world's last frontier of mystery and darkness, - the great oceans, in which the author proves herself both scientist and stylist. While neither sensational nor sloppy with her facts, Miss Carson writes with clarity and controlled simplicity that makes her story available

even to the uninitiated layman. She begins with the encompassing "mother sea" that once covered the whole earth, and from which the first forms of life evolved; she goes on to record briefly the changes of the great geological periods, the present characteristics of the seas, the tides, winds, currents. There are, too, chapters on isolated wonders such as the birth of volcanic islands. Chapters from this book were condensed into a profile of the sea for the *New Yorker*. Miss Carson, who is also the author of *Under the Sea Wind*, has given us an exquisitely imaginative book, rooted in first rate scholarship, in a field that has not been over-explored.

A RUNAWAY!
15th LARGE PRINTING

The Sea
Around
Us

"When poets write about the sea their errors annoy scientists. When scientists write about the sea their bleak and technical jargon paralyzes poets. Yet neither scientists nor poets should object to 'The Sea Around Us.' It is written with precision more than sufficient for its purpose, and its style and imagination make it a joy to read." —N. Y. Times Book Review

The Sea
Around
Us

"It is a work of science; it is stamped with authority. It is a work of art; it is saturated with the excitement of mystery. It is literature." —N. Y. Herald Tribune

The Sea
Around
Us

"The evocative quality is the book's happiest — the murmuring seashell is never far from the reader's ear." —Chicago Tribune

The Sea
Around
Us

"Simple, sparse of verbiage, as lucid as certain crystal waters she herself describes." —Christian Science Monitor

THE SEA
AROUND US

By Rachel L. Carson
$3.50 • all bookstores
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers of Fine Books for over Four Centuries

"One of the most beautiful books of our time."

—FRANCESCA LA MONTE,

N. Y. Herald Tribune Book Review

—LEWIS GANNETT, N. Y. Herald Tribune

"A joy to read."

—JONATHAN NORTON LEONARD,

N. Y. Times Book Review

"No praise is high enough for her book. It has the same fascination as the sea."

—EDWARD A. LAYCOCK, Boston Globe

"No other writer has so excitingly surveyed the mystery of the sea as Miss Carson does... Her book is likely to stand for years to come as a popular classic on the sea."

—JOHN BARKHAM, Saturday Review Syndicate

6th large printing

Rachel L. Carson's
The Sea
AROUND US

6 charts, index, bibliography

At all bookstores • $3.50

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
114 Fifth Avenue, New York 11, N. Y.

AUGUST 4, 1951

Plunge into
The Sea
AROUND US

By RACHEL L.
CARSON

—N. Y. Herald Tribune Book Review

"A joy to read."

—N. Y. Times Book Review

"No praise is high enough for her book."

—Boston Globe

4th large printing

$3.50 at all bookstores

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

114 Fifth Avenue, N. Y. 11

The Sea
AROUND US

By Rachel L. Carson

$3.50 • OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Sea
AROUND US

By Rachel L. Carson

$3.50
OXFORD
University Press