She enjoyed reading St. Nicholas Magazine, which carried her first published stories, the works of Beatrix Potter, the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, and in her teen years, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Carson gained admission to Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham University, in Pittsburgh, where she originally studied English but switched her major to biology in January 1928.

[8] After her first year of graduate school, Carson became a part-time student, taking an assistantship in Raymond Pearl's laboratory, where she worked with rats and Drosophila, to earn money for tuition.

She had intended to continue for a doctorate, however in 1934 Carson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins to search for a full-time teaching position to help support her family during the Great Depression.

At the urging of her undergraduate biology mentor Mary Scott Skinker, Carson secured a temporary position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where she wrote radio copy for a series of weekly educational broadcasts called Romance Under the Waters.

The series of 52 seven-minute programs focused on aquatic life and was intended to generate public interest in fish biology and the bureau's work, a task that several writers before Carson had not managed.

[10] Carson's supervisor, pleased with the success of the radio series, asked her to write the introduction to a public brochure about the fisheries bureau; he also worked to secure her the first full-time position that became available.

Sitting for the civil service exam, she outscored all other applicants and, in 1936, became the second woman hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist.

[15] Oxford University Press expressed interest in Carson's book proposal for a life history of the ocean, spurring her to complete by early 1950 the manuscript of what would become The Sea Around Us.

[18] She was very unhappy with the final version of the script by writer, director, and producer Irwin Allen; she found it untrue to the atmosphere of the book and scientifically embarrassing, describing it as "a cross between a believe-it-or-not and a breezy travelogue.

Carson moved to Silver Spring, Maryland to care for Roger and spent much of 1957 putting together a new living situation and studying specific environmental threats.

By late 1957, Carson was closely following federal proposals for widespread pesticide spraying; the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) planned to eradicate fire ants.

However, when The New Yorker commissioned a long and well-paid article on the topic from Carson, she began considering writing more than simply the introduction and conclusion as planned; soon, it was a solo project.

[47] She also found significant support and extensive evidence from a group of biodynamic agriculture organic market gardeners, their adviser, Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, other contacts, and their suite of legal actions (1957–1960) against the U.S. Government.

Carson attended the subsequent FDA hearings on revising pesticide regulations; she came away discouraged by the aggressive tactics of the chemical industry representatives, which included expert testimony that was firmly contradicted by the bulk of the scientific literature she had been studying.

As she was nearing full recovery in March (just as she was completing drafts of the two cancer chapters of her book), she discovered cysts in her left breast, one of which necessitated a mastectomy.

By mid-1962, Brooks and Carson had essentially finished the editing and were laying the groundwork for promoting the book by sending the manuscript out to select individuals for final suggestions.

Scientists of the Food and Drug Administration who reported the discovery of these tumors were uncertain how to classify them but felt there was some "justification for considering them low grade hepatic cell carcinomas."

Carson attended the White House Conference on Conservation in May 1962; Houghton Mifflin distributed proof copies of Silent Spring to many of the delegates and promoted the upcoming New Yorker serialization.

[68] Though Silent Spring had generated a relatively high level of interest based on pre-publication promotion, this became much more intense with the serialization in The New Yorker, which began on June 16, 1962, issue.

Around that time, Carson also learned that Silent Spring had been selected as the Book of the Month for October; as she put it, this would "carry it to farms and hamlets all over that country that don't know what a bookstore looks like—much less The New Yorker.

White-Stevens labeled her "...a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature,"[74] while former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, in a letter to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, reportedly concluded that because she was unmarried despite being physically attractive, she was "probably a Communist.

However, Carson had made it clear she was not advocating the banning or complete withdrawal of helpful pesticides but was instead encouraging responsible and carefully managed use with an awareness of the chemicals' impact on the entire ecosystem.

[76] In fact, she concludes her section on DDT in Silent Spring not by urging a total ban but with advice for spraying as little as possible to limit the development of resistance.

[66] The academic community, including prominent defenders such as H. J. Muller, Loren Eiseley, Clarence Cottam, and Frank Egler, by and large, backed the book's scientific claims; public opinion soon turned Carson's way as well.

The chemical industry campaign backfired, as the controversy greatly increased public awareness of potential pesticide dangers, as well as Silent Spring book sales.

The essay, which was combined with photographs by Charles Pratt and others, exhorts parents to help their children experience the "...lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world ... available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky and their amazing life.

"[9] Ecofeminist scholars argue that not only was the dissenting rhetoric gendered to paint Carson as hysterical but was done because her arguments challenged the capitalist production of large agri-business corporations.

[121] Carson was featured during the "HerStory" video tribute to notable women on U2's tour in 2017 for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree during a performance of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)"[122] from the band's 1991 album Achtung Baby.

[123] Democratic Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland had intended to submit a resolution celebrating Carson for her "legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility" on the 100th anniversary of her birth.