Under the Sea-Wind.
Carson, Rachel L. Under the Sea-Wind. A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life. Illustrations by Howard French. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941.
8vo.; blue cloth, stamped in blue and gilt; dust-jacket; light wear to head of spine.
First edition of Carson’s first book, offering her readers “a vivid cross-section picture of coast-line life from the highest soaring gull—to the stinging jellies that hunt for food just below the wave’s surface—down to the old octopus who lives in an ancient wreck on the floor of the ocean.” An illustrated glossary appears at the end. In it, expanding substantially her 1937 The Atlantic Monthly article, Carson expresses “a true scientist’s love of the sea” in “a prose that combines scientific accuracy with a disciplined lyricism.”
Carson (1907-1964) had toyed with a career in letters early on, entering the Pennsylvania College for Women as an English major, but her interest in science and nature soon won out. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Biology, went on to receive her Master’s from Johns Hopkins, pursued post-graduate work at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, and went on to teach at the University of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins summer school for several years until she was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (formerly the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) in 1936. Carson spent the next 15 years there as an aquatic biologist, and was for her last three years the editor-in-chief of their publications. Her editorial tasks provided an apt segue into writing, beginning with this hefty volume which anchored her career in public education and environmental activism. That career culminated in the publication of her fourth and final work, Silent Spring (1961), which lead to the introduction of significant new legislation in the United States shortly after her premature death of cancer in 1964.
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