Timeline

1907

  • May 27: Rachel Louise Carson was born in one of the upstairs bedrooms of her family home in Springdale, Pennsylvania

1918 (11 years old)

  • Publishes her first article in the St. Nicholas magazine “A Battle in the Clouds”

1925 (18 years old)

  • Graduates from Parnassus High
  • September 15: arrived at Berry Hall at PCW

1928 (21 years old)

  • February: Carson tells  Miss Skinker about plans to declare Biology as her new major

1929 (22 years old)

  • Signs a formal agreement offering 2 of her father’s lots  to PCW as collateral and for plans of payment  by installments
  • June: graduated magna cum laude from PCW
  • Summer: earned a scholarship to study at MBL
  • Reapplied to John Hopkins with a recommendation from Skinker and earned a full scholarship

1930 (23 years old)

  • Most of her family joins her in Baltimore

1932 (25 years old)

  • Signs over to PCW the title of the pair of lots owned by her father that she’d offered as collateral in 1929
  • Earns her master’s degree from John’s Hopkins University
  • Fall: began work toward her PhD

1935 (28 years old)

  • Early 1935: Took and passed civil service examinations in parasitology, wildlife biology and aquatic biology
  • Father passed away, leaving Rachel head of the household
  • October: hired as a field aide by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in their Baltimore office

1936 (29 years old)

  • 1 march:The Baltimore Sun publishes her first newspaper story “It’ll be shad time soon”
  • Spring: Higgins  rejects “The World of Waters” and suggests that she submit it to the Atlantic Monthly magazine instead

1937 (30 years old)

  • Early 1937: Marian Carson passes away from pneumonia, leaving Rachel and her mother to care for Marian’s two daughters- Virginia and Marjorie
  • September: “Undersea” appears in the Atlantic’s September 1937 issue

1938 (31 years old)

  • Met von Loon and Howe, started planning her first book
  • Fall: took a working vacation to the Bureau of Fisheries station at Beaufort, North Carolina with her mother and two nieces

1940 (33 years old)

  • Bureau of Fisheries merges with the Bureau of Biological Survey to form the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
  • Transferred from Baltimore to a research laboratory at College Park, Maryland

1941 (34 years old)

  • Simon and Schuster Publishes Under the Sea-Wind

1942 (35 years old)

  • became assistant aquatic biologist to the Fishery Biology section of the Interior Department’s Fish & Wildlife Service
  • August: transferred from the Interior building to offices rented for the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS)

1943 (36 years old)

  • May: returns to the interior building in Washington

1945 (38 years old)

  • FWS airplane sprays 117 acres of forest in Patuxent Research Refuge in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
  • July.: Wrote a story about the dangers of DDT and proposed it to Reader’s Digest but it was rejected
  • Began to consider leaving government service

1946 (39 years old)

  • Carson undergoes surgery to remove a tumor from her breast, it is believed to be non-cancerous
  • Started the Conservation in Action Series
  • July: Visited the Maine coast with her mother

1948 (41 years old)

  • asked to be released from her contract with Simon and Schuster

1951 (44 years old)

  • The Sea Around Us was published

1952 (45 years old)

  • Leaves the Fish & Wildlife Service to become a full-time author

1953 (46 years old)

  • June: Carson moves to a cottage called Silverledges on the Maine shoreline  with her mother, niece- Marjie and grandnephew- Roger

1955 (48 years old)

  • The Edge of the Sea is published

1957 (50 years old)

  • Niece- Marjie dies, leaving Carson to care for Roger, her grandnephew

1958 (51 years old)

  • Maria Carson dies
  • Reader’s Digest was planning a favorable article about DDT, Carson wrote to the magazine’s editor warning him of the harmful effects
  • Signed a contract with her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for a book about pesticides tentatively titled “The Control of Nature”, would appear in installments in the New Yorker

1960 (53 years old)

  • While writing Silent Spring, Carson discovers that she has cancer

1962 (55 years old)

  • Silent Spring is published
  • June 1962 three long excerpts of Silent Spring published in consecutive issues of the New Yorker
  • September: CBS Reports interested in making an episode on Silent Spring and its author
  • October: Life magazine wrote a piece about Carson

1963 (56 years old)

  • April: Appears in television special “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson”
  • May: The Science Advisory Committee issues a report that supports Carson’s claims
  • June: Testifies in Congress about the harmful long-term effects of pesticides on human beings as well as the environment

1964 (57 years old)

  • April 14: Carson dies in her home at Silver Spring, Maryland, after a long battle with breast cancer

1970

  • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is created

1972

  • DDT is banned in the U.S.

1980

  • Carson posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter

1991

  • The Rachel Carson Prize is established

2004

  • The Rachel Carson Award is established by the Audubon Society