In 1955 Rachel Carson was at the peak of her profession as a popular writer of science books about the sea. Under the Sea Wind (published in 1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955) were all best-sellers, and they catapulted her into celebrity as one of the best loved and most sought after American authors. By 1956, she was planning a book in which she intended to explore the human race's relationship with nature. Fearing that human beings were severing their connection to the web of life, she began the painstaking research that would form her next work, Silent Spring, a book that would change her life and the world.

Carson's deepest held beliefs were in the delicate interconnectedness of nature and the sanctity of life. Her work as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during World War II (1939-1945) had...