Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. It is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century.
RACHEL CARSON (1907 to 1964) spent a good deal of her professional life as a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her first three books: Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea, established her reputation as a first rate writer on the natural world.