Silent Spring: 40th Anniversary Edition

About the Author

RACHEL CARSON (1907–1964) spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. By the late 1950s, she had written three lyrical, popular books about the sea, including the best-selling The Sea Around Us, and had become the most respected science writer in America. She completed Silent Spring against formidable personal odds and despite critical attacks that echoed the assault on Charles Darwin when he published The Origin of Species, and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history.

Despite the enormous impact of Silent Spring, Carson remained modest about her accomplishment; as she wrote to a friend, “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been upper-most in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done… Now I can believe I have at least helped a little.”

Among the many honors and awards Carson received during her lifetime were the National Book Award, for The Sea Around Us (1951); a Guggenheim fellowship (1951–1952); the John Burroughs Medal (1952); the Henry G. Bryant Gold Medal (1952); the Women’s National Book Association Constance Lindsay Skinner Award (1963); the Conservationist of the Year Award from the National Wildlife Federation (1963); and a Gold Medal from the New York Zoological Society (1963).

Rachel Carson lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, until her untimely death.