Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist and writer, best known for her sea trilogy of Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, and for Silent Spring (1962), which examined the harm synthetic pesticides did to wildlife and ecosystems. She began as an aquatic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries before becoming a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Silent Spring helped lead to a nationwide ban on DDT and to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson died in 1964.
