BOB SCHUTZ/AP Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, at home in Washington D.C. on March 13, 1963

Monday, March 29, 1999
She was always a writer, and she always knew that. Like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, Millay and E.B. White, 10-year-old Rachel Louise Carson, born in 1907 in the Allegheny Valley town of Springdale, Pa., was first published in the St. Nicholas literary magazine for children. A reader and loner and devotee of birds, and indeed all nature, the slim, shy girl of plain face and dark curly hair continued writing throughout adolescence, chose an English major at Pennsylvania College for Women and continued to submit poetry to periodicals. Not until junior year, when a biology course reawakened the "sense of wonder" with which she had always encountered the natural world, did she switch her major to zoology, not yet aware that her literary and scientific passions might be complementary.

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Graduating magna cum laude in 1929, Carson won her master's degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins, but increasing family responsibilities caused her to abandon her quest for a doctorate. For a few years she would teach zoology at the University of Maryland, continuing her studies in the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass. It was there, in her early 20s, that she first saw &$#151; nd became enchanted with &$#151; the enormous mysteries of the sea.

In 1935 "Ray" Carson, as some friends knew her, took part-time work writing science radio scripts for the old Bureau of Fisheries, a job that led, in 1936, to a full-time appointment as a junior aquatic biologist. To eke out her small income, she contributed feature articles to The Baltimore Sun, most of them related to marine zoology. Though her poetry was never to be published, a strong lyrical prose was already evolving, and one of her pieces for a government publication seemed to the editor so elegant and unusual that he urged her to submit it to the Atlantic Monthly.

Undersea, the young writer's first publication in a national magazine (September 1937), was seminal in theme and tone to all her later writing. Together with an evocative Sun feature, Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea ("From every river and stream along the whole Atlantic Coast, eels are hurrying to the..."), it was the starting point for her first book.

Under the Sea-Wind (1941), Carson's favorite among her books, would pass almost unnoticed. Meanwhile, her editorial duties in what would become the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had increased. In 1946 she was promoted to information specialist, and in 1949 became chief editor of publications.

In their first meeting, the naturalist Louis Halle found Carson "quiet, diffident, neat, proper and without affectation." Nothing written about her since seems to dispute this. But for all her modesty and restraint, she was not prim. She had a mischievous streak, a tart tongue and confidence in her own literary worth.

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