Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, and an author of widely read books on the sea and ecological themes. She was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the former Pennsylvania College for Women (1929) and Johns Hopkins University (M.A., 1932). Her fascination with the sea began in 1929, when after graduating from college, she went to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole as a Beginning Investigator. Once there she changed her field of study from that of the cranial nerves of reptiles to marine biology. She taught zoology at the University of Maryland from 1931 to 1936. After that she was an aquatic biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and its successor, the Fish and Wildlife Service, from 1936 to 1952. Her books on the sea, Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), for which she was awarded the 1952 National Book Award in non-fiction, and The Edge of the Sea (1955), are praised for beauty of language as well as scientific accuracy.
Rachel Carson is remembered mainly for her last work, Silent Spring, published in 1962, two years before her death. This controversial work, which examined in alarming detail the environmental damage caused by the widespread use of chemical pesticides, led to a greater public awareness of the need to preserve and maintain our weakened environment. Her work also helped to bring about increased state and national regulation of the manufacture, use, and disposal of chemical pesticides.