In the spring of 1936, Rachel Carson was working part-time at the United States Bureau of Fisheries in Baltimore. Her job mostly involved communications'producing radio scripts, reports, and brochures, the latter of which would change the course of her life. Asked to write an introduction for a brochure on fish, she delivered something that was lyrical, lively, and, according to her manager, entirely too good to be a government brochure. 'I don't think it will do,' Carson's boss is said to have remarked. 'Better try again. But send this one to The Atlantic.' She eventually did, and in the summer of 1937, she got a response. 'We have every one of us been impressed by your uncommonly eloquent little essay,' Edward Weeks, an Atlantic editor, wrote from Boston. 'The findings of science you have illuminated in such a way as to fire the imagination of the layman.' The magazine ran Carson's essay with the title 'Undersea' in the September 1937 issue. Weeks had identified what many of...
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