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Early
Life and Work
Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on a small family farm near
Springdale, Pennsylvania, just up the Allegheny River from
Pittsburgh. An avid reader, she also spent a lot of time exploring
around her family's 65-acre (26 ha) farm. She began writing stories
(often involving animals) at age eight, and had her first story
published at age eleven. She especially enjoyed the St. Nicholas
Magazine (which carried her first published stories), the works of
Beatrix Potter, and the novels of Gene Stratton Porter, and in her
teen years, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis
Stevenson. The natural world, particularly the ocean, was the common
thread of her favorite literature. Carson attended Springdale's
small school through tenth grade, then completed high school in
nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 at the top of her
class of forty-four students.
At the Pennsylvania College for Women (today known as Chatham
University), as in high school, Carson was somewhat of a loner. She
originally studied English, but switched her major to biology in
January 1928, though she continued contributing to the school's
student newspaper and literary supplement. Though admitted to
graduate standing at Johns Hopkins University in 1928, she was
forced to remain at the Pennsylvania College for Women for her
senior year due to financial difficulties; she graduated magna cum
laude in 1929. After a summer course at the Marine Biological
Laboratory, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at
Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1929.
After her first year of graduate school, Carson became a part-time
student, taking an assistantship in Raymond Pearl's laboratory,
where she worked with rats and Drosophila, to earn money for
tuition. After false starts with pit vipers and squirrels, she
completed a dissertation project on the embryonic development of the
pronephros in fish. She earned a master's degree in zoology in June
1932. She had intended to continue for a doctorate, but in 1934
Carson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins to search for a full-time
teaching position to help support her family. In 1935, her father
died suddenly, leaving Carson to care for her aging mother and
making the financial situation even more critical. At the urging of
her undergraduate biology mentor Mary Scott Skinker, she settled for
a temporary position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, writing
radio copy for a series of weekly educational broadcasts entitled
"Romance Under the Waters". The series of fifty-two seven-minute
programs focused on aquatic life and was intended to generate public
interest in fish biology and in the work of the bureau—a task the
several writers before Carson had not managed. Carson also began
submitting articles on marine life in the Chesapeake Bay, based on
her research for the series, to local newspapers and magazines.
Carson's supervisor, pleased with the success of the radio series,
asked her to write the introduction to a public brochure about the
fisheries bureau; he also worked to secure her the first full-time
position that became available. Sitting for the civil service exam,
she outscored all other applicants and in 1936 became only the
second woman to be hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time,
professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist.
Early career and publications
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 had originally written 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 book form. 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
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, supervising a
small writing staff by 1945 and becoming chief editor of
publications in 1949. 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 the
manuscript of what would become The Sea Around Us by early 1950.[9]
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—and nine chapters were serialized in The New Yorker. The Sea
Around Us remained on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 86
weeks, was abridged by Reader's Digest, won the 1952 National Book
Award and the Burroughs Medal, and resulted in Carson's being
awarded two honorary doctorates. She also licensed a documentary
film to be based on The Sea Around Us. The book's success led to the
republication of Under the Sea Wind, which also became a
best-seller. With success came financial security, and Carson was
able to give up her job in 1952 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
documentary 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 script did not
extend to any control over its content. Allen proceeded in spite of
Carson's objections to produce a very successful documentary. It won
the 1953 Oscar for Best Documentary, but Carson was so embittered by
the experience that she never again sold film rights to her work.
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