Chapter 6
Success at Last
Rachel spent a lot of time with the people she worked with at the Fish and Wildlife Service, including her good friend and coworker Shirley Briggs. They went hiking and bird watching together. They went to parties and enjoyed their free time.
But Rachel still worked as hard as ever. And over the next few years she had some amazing experiences. She went deep-sea diving. Seeing sharks, octopuses, and other sea creatures up close was one of the greatest moments of her life.
Afterward, she told a friend, “Everything seems a little different.” She also tracked alligators in the swampy Florida Everglades and spent time on a research boat in the North Atlantic Ocean.
All the fantastic experiences she had and the discoveries she made went into her next book, The Sea Around Us. The book was published in 1951. In it, Rachel taught people how the oceans affect all of us.
The way Rachel wrote in this book was almost like poetry. Her words were gentle, and she expressed her ideas in a clear and thoughtful way. Rachel talked about “ecology,” which is the relationship between a group of living things and their environment. It was the first time most people had heard this word, and Rachel wanted her readers to understand how important it was.
The Sea Around Us became a huge best seller, and Rachel earned a good deal of money from the book. During the Christmas season of 1951, four thousand copies of the book were being sold every day.
The book, published by Oxford University Press, won two special awards—the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and a Burroughs Medal in nature writing. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for eighty-six weeks, and it was translated into twenty-eight languages.
Readers were fascinated by Rachel’s knowledge and love of the sea. Many people wanted to meet her and ask her about her latest book. But this was hard for the shy Rachel Carson. She found it very difficult to live with the fame that her incredible book had brought.
With the huge success of The Sea Around Us, Rachel decided to get her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, printed again. This time the book became a top seller. People were interested in what Rachel had to say. Now she had two books on the best-seller list. Her money worries were finally over. In 1952 Rachel quit her job and devoted her time to writing. And what she wanted to write about was the natural world that she loved so much.
Rachel decided to research new ideas for her next book. She and her mother drove up and down the East Coast of the United States, studying the coastal shores and taking notes. Rachel bragged that she and her mother drove over two thousand miles in just a few months. They visited coral beaches in Florida, sandy beaches in North Carolina, and rocky beaches in Maine. Rachel wanted to observe the plants and sea life in those very different kinds of places.
Now that she was writing full-time, Rachel was able to finish her next book much more quickly. In October 1955, The Edge of the Sea was published. Readers were excited to read Rachel’s new book. It became an instant best seller. Like her other books, she used poetic words to describe the animals she had seen on the beaches. She explained how all the animals in these places had adapted to the places they lived. Whether they lived on gentle coral beaches, warm sandy beaches, or rough rocky beaches, animals and plants became what they were because of their environment. Rachel also helped readers understand how they fit into those environments, too.
With the success of her third book, Rachel became even more famous. Her fans wanted to meet her. They tracked her down when she was getting her hair done in a beauty parlor. They came up to her when she was trying to have a quiet meal in a restaurant. They even knocked on her hotel room door early in the morning. Rachel was happy that so many people read and liked her books, but it was sometimes difficult for her to handle all the attention. She was still the same shy girl from Springdale, Pennsylvania, who liked exploring the woods on her own.
