Rachel Carson was a biology graduate from Pennsylvania College at a time when there were few women in science. In 1952 she resigned from the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to devote herself to writing, and produced her fourth book, Silent Spring, in 1962. So threatened was America's chemical industry by the work that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to discredit Rachel Carson, only for U.S. President John F. Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee to investigate and subsequently vindicate Carson's work, resulting in an immediate strengthening of the regulation of chemical pesticides.

In her lifetime, Rachel Carson was awarded the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the John Burroughs Medal, the Gold Medal of the New York Zoological Society and the Audubon Society Medal, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 1964, at the age of 56.