In 1951, the author and biologist Rachel Carson received the National Book Award for “The Sea Around Us,” in which she combined rigorous science and elegant prose to explore the history, importance, and wonders of the world’s oceans.
In her acceptance speech, Carson expounded on the vital importance of sharing science with the public.
“We live in a scientific age; yet by a strange paradox we behave as though knowledge of science is the prerogative of a small number of men, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories,” she said. “This is not true. It cannot be true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself.”
In accepting the National Book Award in 1951 for “The Sea Around Us,” Carson emphasized the importance of blending literature and science in a way that informs the public about important scientific questions facing humanity.
Carson dedicated her career to describing and celebrating the scientific intricacies and inspiring beauty of the nature world. She wrote a trilogy of books, including “The Sea Around Us,” which contained poetic descriptions of the world’s maritime systems and ecology grounded in science. Then, in 1962, her seminal book, “Silent Spring,” documented the environment harm caused by DDT and other pesticides, helping to launch the modern environmental movement.
“Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision,” an exhibit now on view at Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, follows Carson’s career and traces earlier thinkers who influenced her work, while also considering how certain forms of environmental thinking and activism were absent from her vision.
The exhibit, open through Oct. 4, draws on Carson’s archives, which she had arranged to have donated to Yale prior to her death from cancer in 1964. It features about 100 objects, including personal letters, notebooks, and handwritten drafts.
Carson as a child sitting with her dog, Candy. The exhibit explores Carson’s early life and influences.
The show is curated by Carla Baricz, librarian for literature in English, Italian, and comparative literature at Yale Library, and James Kessenides, the Kaplanoff Librarian for American History.
“We aimed to use the remarkable materials in the Carson papers to help viewers engage with her life and work, including highlights of her career and of the collection,” Kessenides said. “We also wanted to contextualize the time in which she lived and explore lesser-known aspects of her work and her experience.”
Here are five more things to know about the exhibit:
The archival materials provide unique opportunities for insight into Carson’s writing process and thinking.
The exhibit offers a vivid sense of the enormous care and thought Carson put into her work.
“The exhibit allows viewers to see her work in progress, from handwritten pages to typewritten drafts to the published work,” Baricz said.
While writing her first book, “Under the Sea-Wind,” which was published in 1941, Carson would revise individual pages again and again until the language reflected the science. A handwritten manuscript of the book’s second chapter is on display. She read the chapters aloud to herself and to her mother, who would type up the drafts. Carson would further revise the typescripts. She continued this process over the course of writing the three books that comprise her “Sea Trilogy,” the label states.
The exhibit also shows how Carson incorporated the latest scientific research into her writing. One of Carson’s research notebooks for “The Sea Around Us,” published in 1951, is on display. It is opened to a page on which the author notes that it takes more than 3,000 times as much heat to warm a given volume of the ocean a single degree as to warm an equal amount of air.
“Writing to scientists and colleagues throughout the world, exchanging information with them, was very important to her work,” Kessenides said. “She also was very diligent about collecting published research, including journal articles and government reports.”
This famous photograph of Carson peering into a microscope, taken in 1962 to publicize her book, “Silent Spring,” has been adapted for scores of publications, including children’s books about the author.
A pair of prominent 19th-century American philosophers and essayists make cameos.
In pondering humanity’s place in the natural world, Carson followed a path previously tread by transcendentalist philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The display includes a holograph manuscript of Emerson’s 1839 poem, “Each and All,” which expresses his “belief in a unified whole of nature that reflects goodness, truth, and beauty,” the label text states.
“We want to show Carson’s engagement with transcendentalism,” Baricz said. “The transcendentalists believe in the unity of nature.”
In a holograph manuscript of the closing paragraphs of “Walden,” published in 1854, Thoreau writes of “a strong and beautiful bug” that emerged from the wood of a table that had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for 60 years. The long-dormant insect springing back to life served as a metaphor for the possibility of a “beautiful and winged life” of human potential, according to the exhibit text. The curators suggest that Carson’s cabin at the estuary of the Sheepscot River in Maine evokes Thoreau’s building of a cabin at Walden Pond. A section of a wooden stud from Thoreau’s Walden cabin is on view.
Even renowned writers sometimes struggle with cliches.
Carson’s landmark “Silent Spring” documented the natural harms inflicted by widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. But in drafting the book, Carson toiled to make each sentence count. A holograph manuscript of the first chapter includes the hackneyed line, “Once upon a time there was a town called Green Meadows,” which was replaced in subsequent drafts by the more elegant, “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”
This handwritten draft of the first chapter of “Silent Spring” offers insight into Carson’s writing process.
Charles M. Schultz was a fan; agrochemical company Monsanto decidedly not so.
“Silent Spring” provoked both outrage and adulation. In the former camp was the pesticide industry, which launched a vicious campaign to discredit Carson and her work. Monsanto, one of the country’s leading pesticide manufacturers at the time, attacked Carson in the pages of its in-house magazine, which rivaled the Book of the Month Club in circulation, according to the exhibit text. A cartoon from the magazine on view depicts a woman crouching in her garden as insects march toward her carrying a sign that reads, “Ban the insect bomb!” and “Read Silent Spring.”
On the other side, cartoonist Charles M. Schultz, creator of the hugely popular “Peanuts” comic strip, was one of Carson’s admirers. A “Peanuts” strip on display features Lucy Van Pelt leaning back against Schroeder’s toy piano. She mentions Carson, which causes Schroeder to lose his patience, shouting that Lucy is always talking about Rachel Carson. “We girls need our heroines,” Lucy responds.
The poet and theologian Thomas Merton saw the importance of Carson’s work.
In January 1963, the Trappist monk, poet, and theologian Thomas Merton wrote Carson a long and thoughtful letter, which is displayed in the exhibit. In the letter, Merton writes that “Silent Spring” is “a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization.”
“I desperately hope that everyone who has a chance to help form public opinion on these vital practical matters may read your book,” Merton wrote.
In a postscript, the monk and mystic indicated that he would like to write Carson in the future about some problems at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky where he lived, particularly cedar trees that were dying “unaccountably” there and “an awful plague of bagworms.”
By early 1963, Carson was suffering from metastatic breast cancer. The exhibit notes that she continued to make public appearances and to advocate for the environment as she battled cancer, still managing to do magazine photoshoots and a television interview with CBS News. She died on April 14, 1964.
