Rachel Carson.Org 
A Website Devoted to the Life and Work of Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.

She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article "Undersea" (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941). In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing.

She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly.
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http://www.rachelcarson.org/

Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Site
Carson had long been aware of the dangers of chemical pesticides but was also aware of the controversy within the agricultural community, which needed such pesticides to increase crop production. She had long hoped someone else would publish an expose' on DDT but realized finally that only she had the background as well as the economic freedom to do it. 

She made the decision to produce Silent Spring after years of research across the United States and Europe with the help of Shirley Briggs, a former Fish and Wildlife Service artist who had become editor of an Audubon Naturalist Society magazine called Atlantic Naturalist. Clarence Cottam, another former Fish and Wildlife Service employee, also provided Carson with support and documentation on DDT research conducted but not generally known. As expected, her book provoked a firestorm of controversy as well as personal attacks on her professional integrity. 

The pesticide industry mounted a massive campaign to discredit Carson even though she did not urge the complete banning of pesticides but rather that research be conducted to ensure pesticides were used safely and alternatives to dangerous chemicals such as DDT be found. The federal government, however, ordered a complete review of its pesticide policy and Carson was asked to testify before a Congressional committee along with other witnesses. As a direct result of the study, DDT was banned. With the publication of Silent Spring, Carson is credited with launching the contemporary environmental movement and awakening concern by thinking Americans about the environment.
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http://rachelcarson.fws.gov/

Peter Matthiessen Profile
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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http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/carson.html

Excerpt From Linda Lear's biography
Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
By the summer of 1921 Rachel's writing had nearly outgrown the confines of the St. Nicholas League. Barely fourteen, she submitted a piece to the magazine for sale in June 1921. Assistant Editor Frances Marshal replied that while they could not buy her essay for St. Nicholas, they could use it for "publicity work" and paid her for it at the rate of a cent a word. When the check came Rachel was ecstatic. She scrawled across the envelope "first payment" and tucked it away. 

That same summer Rachel began sending her work to other magazines. In order to keep track of the disposition of her literary efforts, she designed and maintained a ledger. It shows that she submitted a story, "Just Dogs," of 4,000 words to at least three magazines: St. Nicholas, Author's Press, and Our Animal Friends. Although it was rejected by all three, apparently because of its ubiquitous subject matter, Rachel was undeterred. 

The format of her ledger for "Just Dogs" is one she used all her life. Its categories included title, class, length, place submitted, dates sent and returned, postage cost, payment, and comments. Intensely conscious of her expenses, she noted that each story cost eight cents in postage to submit. In an unemotional and businesslike way, she recorded that the story was returned by the publishers three weeks later. 

Rachel's final League story, the first about nature, appeared a year later in July 1922. Entered in the category of "My Favorite Recreation," it tells of "going birds'-nesting" in the Pennsylvania hills with her dog for "a day of our favorite sport" armed with lunchbox, canteen, notebook, and camera. Rachel describes the trail and the birds she and her dog found together. 

Self-confident about her intellectual abilities and solitary by nature, Rachel had few social graces and little understanding of how to interact in a wider society. She was fiercely determined to become all that she could be for herself. She also had a vision, not yet articulated, an inchoate sense of some special calling that awaited her. 

With a combination of excitement and foreboding, Rachel Carson said good-bye to her dogs and to her rocky woodland paths. She climbed into the Model T Ford her father had borrowed for the occasion and, with her parents, drove south to Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania College for Women, determined to become a writer, at the very least.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/rachelcarson.htm


Rachel's Dreams