The following essay appeared in the March, 2003 issue
of Ingram's Advance e-letter, as part of National
Book Award Classics, a monthly series of essays by Neil
Baldwin, highlighting past Winners of the National Book
Award.
Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
The Sea Around Us
Rachel Louise Carson was born on a farm in the rural,
riverside town of Springdale, Pennsylvania, the youngest
of three children. From the age of ten, when she published
her first short story, A Battle in the Clouds, she knew
she would become a professional writer when she grew
up. Rachel's mother, Maria, encouraged her daughter's
dream, and instilled in her a lifelong passion for the
natural world.
 Rachel
received a full academic scholarship to attend the Pennsylvania
College for Women (now Chatham College). She started
out as an English major, but a required biology course
made a deep intellectual impression. She changed her
major to zoology, graduated magna cum laude in science,
won a fellowship for summer study at the Wood's Hole
Oceanographic Institute, then went on to Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore for a master's degree in genetics.
She managed to combine her expanding expertise in marine
science with her formidable writing talent into a part-time
job writing radio scripts for the United States Bureau
of Fisheries - becoming the first woman to work for
this agency in other than a clerical position. By the
mid-1930's, Rachel was publishing in a variety of popular
magazines. Her first major article, Undersea, appeared
in 1937 in the Atlantic Monthly. This led to
her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, in 1941,
followed by a series of path-finding articles on the
effects of DDT upon wildlife.
In 1949, Rachel Carson was promoted to editor-in-chief
for all publications at the Fish and Wildlife Service.
She won the George Westinghouse Science Writing Award,
which led to a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, freeing
her to write The Sea Around Us.
Published in July, 1951, by Oxford University Press,
the book hit the New York Times best-seller list
within two months. By November, it had sold more than
100,000 copies - and after The Sea Around Us won
the National Book Award in March, 1952, it immediately
sold another 100,000 copies, and stayed on the Times
list for an astonishing 86 weeks.
"The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are
what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty
in them, science will discover these qualities,"
Rachel Carson said in her self-effacing remarks accepting
the National Book Award, "If they are not there,
science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my
book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately
put it there, but because no one could write truthfully
about the sea and leave out the poetry."
Indeed, The Sea Around Us reads at times with
an almost Biblical tone. Rachel Carson is a meticulous
stylist. This is not so much a "science" book;
rather, it is a spiritual and at times quite emotional
hymn to the mysteries and magic of the sea, within which
scientific information is seamlessly interwoven, creating
a rhythm and tone replicating the surge and flow of
the tides.
Carson approaches the sea as if she were constructing
its biography, starting with its origins, then gradually
penetrating deeper and deeper below the surface, so
that we are immersed in the subject matter - more resembling
a comforting, warm bath than a fight in the undertow
of the pounding surf - all the while carried forward
by the author's fine prose style, in which she often
goes out of her way to address the reader directly.
From the beginnings of all life out of the synthesis
of minerals and elements within the sea, we are taken
to its wind-driven surfaces, thence to its sunless depths,
where we meet its many exotic inhabitants, gigantic
and microscopic. We learn how islands are born, how
mountain ranges rivaling any on land parade between
continental masses, how sediments of every conceivable
variety coat the floor of the sea, how the shape of
one continent mirrors the face of another, how tides
come and go pushed by the immense power of the sun and
the moon, how the Gulf Stream makes its restless journey
to and fro in the Atlantic.
Along the way, this erudite writer pays tribute to
other masterpieces which have likewise immortalized
the seas - starting with the Book of Job and
with Homer, moving on through Shelley, Swinburne, Milton,
Arnold, Darwin, Melville, Conrad, Eliot - she has read
them all, and incorporates their profound imagery into
her narrative.
Rachel Carson is now lauded as "the mother of
the modern environmental movement." But The
Sea Around Us - unlike its successor, Silent
Spring - was not written as a clarion-call or a
warning.
It should be read with great pleasure as a languorous,
worshipful and compelling prose-poem.
-- Neil Baldwin, Executive Director
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Baldwin photo credit: Sandra Wavrick
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