While many may likely most readily recognize Rachel Carson as the author of Silent Spring, the 1962 environmental science book that successfully reached a wide reading audience and opened the eyes of millions to the risks of indiscriminate overuse of pesticides, it was as a marine biologist that she began her writing career and became a popularly read author.
Debuting in 1941 with Under the Sea-Wind, an intimate account of marine ecology as told through the examination of the lives of a representative selection of “creatures of sea and shore,” she followed with The Sea Around Us in 1951, which won the U.S.’s National Book Award and became an international best seller, and rounded out the thematic trilogy in 1955 with The Edge of the Sea, a book that should be considered essential reading by all who love to explore the shorelines of the worlds oceans.
Together these three books are now known as The Sea Trilogy, and a new beautifully printed and cloth bound single volume collection of them is about to be published by Library of America later this month as their 352nd volume in that extraordinary series of collected American fiction and non-fiction.
Edited by noted biologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber, this much anticipated new collection of what many – including myself – think of as Ms. (she lived prior to the proliferation of PhDs among working scientists and so concluded her formal schooling with an MA from Johns Hopkins) Carson’s most informative as well as enjoyable books, will join the previously published Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment (Library of America Vol. 307, also edited by Dr. Steingraber) in making all of her most significant writings readily available in editions worthy of permanent personal and institutional library collections.
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