Rachel Carson was a biologist, a writer, and the author of the environmental treatise Silent Spring (1962).

Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Robert Warden Carson and Maria (McLean) Carson. A solitary child, she read books and explored the wonders of nature during walks in the woods. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College in Pittsburgh), where she majored in English before switching to biology. She earned her master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932, and, beginning in 1931, taught zoology at the University of Maryland. Intrigued by the sea, Carson enrolled in post-graduate study at Massachusetts' Marine Biological Laboratory.

In 1936 Carson joined the Bureau of Fisheries as a marine biologist and settled in Silver Spring, Maryland. She published her first book, Under the Sea Wind< (1941), before becoming editor-in-chief at the Fish and Wildlife Service, a position that blended her two passions: scientific research and writing. She remained more a scholar than an activist. Nevertheless, research on chlorinated hydrocarbons for the government during World War II exposed Carson to the perils of chemicals and helped awaken her activist voice.

By the 1950s, Carson's work on fishery and marine life was winning widespread notice. Her second book, The Sea Around Us (1951), became a national bestseller, won the National Book Award, and was translated into thirty languages. In 1952 Carson retired from government service to write full-time. After publishing The Edge of the Sea (1955), she embarked on a four-year-long study of the impact of toxic chemicals, such as DDT, on the environment. In 1962 Carson's findings first were serialized in The New Yorker magazine and then were published as Silent Spring, which sold 100,000 copies within three months. Its opening chapter discussed how, during one spring, no birds returned to an area consumed by poisonous pesticides. "The sprays, dusts and aerosols.have the power to kill every insect, good and bad, to still the song of birds," Carson declared. She did not oppose all pesticides, only their indiscriminate use.

Silent Spring drew criticism as well as accolades. Spokespersons for the chemical industry denounced the book's "gross distortions." Some observers even compared its soft-spoken author to Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding fanatic who had crusaded for temperance. Nevertheless, Carson's writings prompted President John F. Kennedy to form a panel to examine the use of pesticides. Silent Spring inspired a documentary by CBS, received the National Audubon Society's highest award, sparked the movement to control pollution, and assumed an honored place alongside other American reform-oriented tracts, such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Carson never married. She adopted her grandnephew and cared for her mother during the latter part of her life. Carson died of cancer in Silver Spring on April 14, 1964. Her contributions to environmentalism continued to receive recognition after she died-in a 1968 television documentary narrated by Helen Hayes, in a wildlife refuge in Maine bearing her name, and, in 1981, on a U.S. postage stamp carrying her portrait.

Freeman, Martha, ed. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Lear, Linda. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

_____, ed. Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.