Rachel Louise Carson
(May 27, 1907 - April 14, 1964) U.S.A.
Naturalist and science writer
Born in Springvale, western Pennsylvania, at the age of 11 she decided that she wanted to be a writer, and in the spring of 1918 she had a short story published in the children's section of a magazine. She won a small scholarship to Pittsburgh College for women and started studying English, but changed to biology. She also studied biology at Johns Hopkins University. She obtained her MA through anatomical studies on the development of the kidney in fish.
 Carson taught at Maryland University from 1931 to 1936. In 1935, Carson's father died, and from 1936 to 1949 she worked as an aquatic biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, later called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in Washington D.C. She became famous with her book The Sea Around Us, for which she won the National Book Award, especially after large sections of the book were published in The New Yorker. In the book she warned of the increasing danger of large-scale marine pollution.
He most well-known book was Silent Spring, which was largely responsible for the founding of the environmental movement and the introduction of environmental legislation. President Kennedy read her work and, despite attacks from the chemical industry, instructed his Science Advisory Committee to investigate. The panel confirmed her results in 1963. Carson received many awards from conservation and animal welfare societies, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Carson died after a bout with breast cancer. In 1980, Carson was posthumously awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the early 1950s she became friends with Dorothy Murdoch Freeman (1898-1978) who was an administrator for the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Services. Rachel Carson had a summer house built in Maine near the home of Dorothy Freeman and her husband and son. The two women exchanged telephone calls and letters over a twelve-year period. They named some of the letters "the strong box" indicating that they should be distroyed after they had been read. Some of these letters may have been destroyed but what remained were collected and annotated by Dorothy Freeman's granddaughter, Martha Freeman.
Her work include:
- Under the Sea-wind (1941)
- The Sea Around Us (1951)
- The Edge of the Sea (1955)
- Silent Spring (1962)
- Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 (1995)
Excerpts from: The Knitting Circle, U.K. - http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/people.html - et alii
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