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The Sea Around Us
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The Sea Around Us is a prize-winning 1951 bestseller by Rachel Carson about life in the ocean and the life of the ocean. It is the second book Carson wrote, following the well-reviewed but poor-selling Under the Sea-Wind (1941), and is the book that launched Carson into the public eye. Often described as "poetic", the book won both the 1952 National Book Award in nonfiction and a Burroughs Medal in nature writing.
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The Sea Around Us is a prize-winning 1951 bestseller by Rachel Carson about life in the ocean and the life of the ocean. It is the second book Carson wrote, following the well-reviewed but poor-selling Under the Sea-Wind (1941), and is the book that launched Carson into the public eye. Often described as "poetic", the book won both the 1952 National Book Award in nonfiction and a Burroughs Medal in nature writing. The book has been translated into over thirty languages. The book remained on the bestseller list for 86 weeks.
Carson began writing the book—which she initially planned to call Return to the Sea—in 1948, just after hiring Marie Rodell as her literary agent. 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. In researching for the book, Carson met with a number of oceanographers to discuss current research. Carson and Rodell had little initial success with magazines as venues for the islands chapter along with a second chapter titled "Another Beachhead". In April 1949, with about a third of the chapters complete, Rodell began trying to find a publisher for the full book. By June, Carson had a contract with Oxford University Press that promised completion of the manuscript by March 1, 1950. Carson continued to write and research through 1949 and into 1950, despite unexpected health and financial difficulties. Part of the research involved a trip aboard a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's ship, Albatross III. After pushing back the completion deadline, Carson completed the manuscript in June 1950. By that time, several periodicals (The New Yorker, Science Digest, and The Yale Review) wanted to publish some of the chapters, as well.
Much of the book (nine of fourteen chapters) was serialized in The New Yorker, beginning on June 2, 1951, and the book was published on July 2 by Oxford University Press. The serialization created a very large popular response, and the book was the subject of the feature review in The New York Times Book Review the day before publication. One chapter ("The Birth of an Island") was published in The Yale Review; it won the George Westinghouse Science Writing prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Critical reception
After the book's release, Carson was inundated with an unexpected volume of fan mail and media attention. She was soon the object of attention from "the literary crowd", and because of a subsequent condensation in Reader's Digest, a very broad general audience as well. The book sold over 250,000 copies in 1951, in addition to the condensation and excerpts published elsewhere. A film version was filmed in 1952 and released in 1953; it won the 1953 Oscar for Best Documentary (though Carson was extremely disappointed with the script and would never sell film rights to her work again).
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