Rachel Carson

Citation metadata

Date: July 7, 2017
From: Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors
Publisher: Gale
Document Type: Biography
Length: 1,552 words

Document controls

Main content

Article Preview :

"Sidelights"

Rachel Carson combined her interest in nature and her desire to write into a very successful career. She acquired her love of nature from her mother, who introduced her to the marvels of the outdoors and its creatures. As early as age ten, her writing ability was manifested in contributions to the St. Nicholas Magazine.

Under the Sea-Wind, Carson's first book, grew out of an essay entitled "Undersea," which was published in the Atlantic in 1937. Reviews of the book, which appeared four years later, included one by a Books contributor: "Carson's unemotional handling of her subject matter is anything but dull. There is drama in every sentence. She rouses our interest in this ocean world and we want to watch it." A Scientific Book Club Review critic observed: "Not since the publication of Salar the Salmon has there been a volume so replete with information about sea life as this book by Rachel Carson.... In the three parts of the book, Miss Carson employs the device of weaving her story around certain individual creatures, although so many other animal 'personages' appear that a paradoxical sense of orderly confusion is conveyed. Here is the darting, swooping, preying struggle that has been going on for untold centuries.... There is poetry here, but no false sentimentality." William Beebe in Saturday Review of Literature commented: "The plethora of facts occasionally smothers the smoothness of diction, and distracts the attention from the word picture itself.... This is not captious criticism, but an appeal for more simple words, fewer terms of physical and faunal geography, and a greater leisureliness in description."

Carson's second effort, The Sea Around Us, required a vast amount of research and two years to write, but resulted in a National Book Award in 1952. A Christian Science Monitor critic commented, "Rachel Carson has achieved that rare, all but unique phenomenon--a literary work about the sea that is comparable with the best, yet offends neither the natural scientist nor the poet." "Rare indeed," added a contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature,"is the individual who can present a comprehensive and well-balanced picture of such a complex entity as the sea in an easy and fluent style and in terms anyone can understand. Rachel Carson is such an individual. Many books have been written on the sea, most of...

Get Full Access
Gale offers a variety of resources for education, lifelong learning, and academic research. Log in through your library to get access to full content and features!
Access through your library

Source Citation

Source Citation   

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1000016120