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A decade after her first book, her agent circulated a second work in progress that proposed to explore the origins and geological aspects of the sea. The material was rejected by 15 magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and National Geographic. Eventually the work came into the hands of Edith Oliver at the New Yorker, who recommended it to William Shawn, who recognized its exceptional quality at once. Much of it was serialized as "A Profile of the Sea," and in July 1951 the entire manuscript was published as The Sea Around Us. It won the John Burroughs Medal, then the National Book Award, and within the year sold more than 200,000 copies in hard cover.
Success permitted Carson to retire from the FWS in 1952 to write full time. That summer she bought land and built a cottage on the Sheepscot River near West Southport on the coast of Maine, where she and her mother had visited since 1946.
Her new celebrity also gave her the opportunity to speak out on concerns she felt strongly about. As early as 1945, Carson and her close colleague Clarence Cottam had become alarmed by government abuse of new chemical pesticides such as DDT, in particular the "predator" and "pest" control programs, which were broadcasting poisons with little regard for the welfare of other creatures. That same year, she offered an article to Reader's Digest on insecticide experiments going on at Patuxent, Md., not far from her home in Silver Spring, to determine the effects of DDT on all life in affected areas. Apparently the Digest was not interested. Carson went back to her government job and her sea trilogy, and not until after the third volume had been completed did she return to this earlier preoccupation.
Meanwhile, the insecticide barrage had been augmented by dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, malathion and other fearful compounds many times stronger than DDT, all of which the government planned to distribute through the Department of Agriculture for public use and commercial manufacture. "The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became," Carson recalled. "I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important."
With her fame and eloquence and reputation for precision, Carson could count on the support of leading scientists and conservation organizations, and was well positioned to command a hearing. Even so, the Digest and other magazines had little interest in this gloomy subject. Then, in 1957, there was a startling wildlife mortality in the wake of a mosquito-control campaign near Duxbury, Mass., followed by a pointless spraying of a DDT/fuel-oil mix over eastern Long Island for eradication of the gypsy moth. Next, an all-out war in the Southern states against the fire ant did such widespread harm to other creatures that its beneficiaries cried for mercy; and after that a great furor arose across the country over the spraying of cranberry plants with aminotriazole, which led to an Agriculture Department ban against all cranberry marketing just in time for Thanksgiving 1959.