The Sea Trilogy

by Rachel Carson

When I was researching a Yankee article about Rachel Carson a few years ago, my favorite detail was about the under-the-radar site where Carson’s ashes were scattered on Southport Island, Maine. There, a bronze plaque states that this “writer, ecologist, and champion of the natural world” was “here at last returned to the sea.” Though she was best known as the author of 1962’s Silent Spring—the 1962 global best-seller about pesticides that helped spark the environmental movement—Carson was profoundly connected to the ocean and the creatures that live in or beside its waters. Read any or all of the three books in this trilogy, and you’ll get a master class in ocean science from a researcher-poet who loved its smallest details, right down to “the salt smell of the rime that glitters on the sun-dried rocks.”

—Jenn Johnson, Yankee senior managing editor

Pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson explores the wonders of the Earth's oceans in these classics of American science and nature writing.

Includes meticulously restored drawings from the original editions, including the nearly 200 illustrations by Bob Hines for The Edge of the Sea

Rachel Carson is perhaps most famous as the author of Silent Spring, but she was first and foremost a "poet of the sea" and the three books collected in this deluxe Library of America volume are classics of American science and nature writing.

Under the Sea-Wind (1941), Carson's lyrical debut, offers an intimate account of maritime ecology through the eyes of three of the ocean's denizens, the individual lives of sanderling, mackerel, and eel dramatically intertwined in the enduring ebb and flow of the tides.

The Sea Around Us (1951)--a winner of the National Book Award--draws on a wealth of oceanographic, meteorological, biological, and historical research to present its subject on a grand, biospheric scale, revealing not only many mysteries of the still-unfathomed depths, but a reverence for the sea as a source of global climate and of life itself.

Concluding Carson's "sea trilogy," The Edge of the Sea (1955) explores the habits of the many small creatures that live on shorelines and in tidepools accessible to any beachcomber: part identification guide, part hymn to ecological complexity, it is a book that conveys the "sense of wonder" in nature for which Carson is justly celebrated.

At a moment when overfishing, pollution, and global warming are causing catastrophic changes to marine environments worldwide, Carson's lyrically detailed accounts of these environments offer a timely reminder of their beauty, fragility, and immense consequence for human life.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library of America
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 768 pages
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.21 x 1.28 x 8.12 inches