The Sea Around Us is a prize-winning and best-selling book by the American marine biologist Rachel Carson, first published as a whole by Oxford University Press in 1951.

Carson initially planned to call the sequel Return to the Sea, and began writing in 1948, just after hiring Marie Rodell as her literary agent.

[5] Carson began by writing a single chapter (what would be "The Birth of an Island") along with a detailed outline, which Rodell used to pitch the book to publishers.

[6] Nine of fourteen chapters were serialized in The New Yorker beginning on June 2, 1951, and the book was published on July 2 by Oxford University Press.

She was soon the object of attention from "the literary crowd," and because of a subsequent condensation in Reader's Digest, a broad general audience as well.