Under the Sea Wind

Under the Sea Wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life (1941) is the first book written by the American marine biologist Rachel Carson. Her book was published by Simon & Schuster in 1941; it received very good reviews, but sold poorly. After the great success of a sequel The Sea Around Us (Oxford, 1951), it was reissued by Oxford University Press; that edition was an alternate Book-of-the-Month Club selection and became another bestseller, and never gone out of print.[1] It is recognized today as one of the "definitive works of American nature writing,"[2] and is in print as one of the Penguin Nature Classics.

Under the Sea Wind
First edition
AuthorRachel L. Carson
IllustratorHoward Frech (first)
Robert W. Hines (1991)
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesSea trilogy
SubjectOcean and shore life
GenreNature writing
PublisherSimon & Schuster
Oxford 1952; Penguin Nature Classics 1996
Publication date
1941
Media typePrint
Followed byThe Sea Around Us 

Background

Under the Sea Wind was based on the article Undersea previously written by Carson and was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1937.[3][4] This work began as an eleven-page introduction to a government fisheries brochure, and grew into Carson's first novel.[5] Prior to the publishing of Undersea, she wrote marine based radio scripts; these writings influenced her later works.[3] The article broadcasts themes of ecology and the unwavering will to survive that marine organisms embody.[3] After her article was published, Dutch-born children's author Hendrik Van Loon became interested in her work. He encouraged and supported her to continue this type of depiction of nature in her writing, as well as advised her about publishing.[6][7] Rachel Carson furthered these messages from her article and expanded these perspectives in Under the Sea Wind. These writing styles continued to appear in her following pieces. In the Penguin Classics publication, Under the Sea Wind was described as Carson's personal favorite book she authored.[8] The failure to initially sell Under the Sea Wind is assumed to have been due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America entering World War II the same year the Under the Sea Wind was published.[9][10] Under the Sea Wind was popularized with the publication of the second book in the Sea Trilogy, The Sea Around Us, and it was this second text that truly established her as a natural history author.[11]

Description

Under the Sea Wind describes the behavior of organisms that live both on and in the sea on the Atlantic coast. Under the Sea Wind consists of three parts, each following a different organism that interacts with the sea, and viewing it from a personified organism’s perspective.[8][11] The first section, Edge of the Sea, follows a female sanderling Carson names Silverbar.[8] The second section, The Gull’s Way,  follows a mackerel named Scomber, and the third section, River and Sea follows Anguilla, an eel.[8] The narrative follows these creature's migration habits over the span of a year.[11]

Viewing ocean life from a broader ecological perspective was crucial to Carson, rather than just isolating parts of the sea. The term "sea wind" was Carson's way of referring to the entirety of the shore, sea, and sky.[5] Carson had a poetic way of writing about nature, while still maintaining the scientific accuracy of her observations.[1][12] Her work draws connections between nature and home, the borders of interrelated communities, and the growing separation between man and nature.[1][11] Carson took inspiration from natural history authors such as Henry Williamson and Henry Beston, and uses her scientific expertise to ground Under the Sea Wind in scientifically accurate detail on each animal's appearance, diet and behavior.[13][14]

Carson's stated goal of using poetic prose and personifying sea life was "to make the sea and its life as vivid a reality for those who may read the book as it has become for me during the past decade."[15] This writing style brought scientific observations to a larger audience, and as stated by fellow marine environmentalist author Joel Hedgpeth in a review of the book, allowed for "turning the subject of the sea to a respectable reading matter for the clientele of the New Yorker and Readers' Digest sets, and inspiring a fashion in literature about the sea, its ways, and creatures."[16] The style of Carson's writing makes the book suitable for children as well as adults, and the appeal is enhanced with illustrations, originally by Howard Frech. These were eventually replaced in 1991 with illustrations by Robert W. Hines. Though Under the Sea Wind is a story of struggle and chance survival, the style that Carson presents is in stark contrast to her later work, Silent Spring, which is much more dire and analytical.[12]

References
  1. Sullivan, Marnie (2012). Vakoc, Douglas (ed.). Revealing the Radical in Rachel Carson's Three Sea Books. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 75–88.
  2. Bryson, Michael (2002). Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology (Under the Sign of Nature). Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 0813921074.
  3. Ferrara, Enzo. (2016). Undersea - Rachel Carson. 10.13135/2384-8677/1433.
  4. Wheeler, J. C. (2013). Rachel Carson: Extraordinary Environmentalist. Minneapolis, Minn: Abdo Publishing.
  5. Carson, Rachel (2007). Under the Sea Wind. London, England: Penguin Classics. pp. ix–xxi.
  6. Davis, Frederick R. (2013-03-01). "From the Sea to Silent Spring". Science. 339 (6123): 1034. doi:10.1126/science.1232265. ISSN 0036-8075.
  7. Lear, Linda J. Rachel Carson, Witness for Nature. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
  8. Carson, Rachel (2007). Under the Sea Wind. London, England: Penguin Classics.
  9. Chambers, John Whiteclay II, ed. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 819-830.
  10. Lear, Linda. Under the Sea-Wind. RachelCarson.org. http://www.rachelcarson.org/UnderTheSeaWind.aspx
  11. Norwood, Vera L. (1987). "The Nature of Knowing: Rachel Carson and the American Environment". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 12 (4): 740–760. doi:10.1086/494364. ISSN 0097-9740.
  12. Arvidson, Adam Regn. "Nature Writing in America: The Power of Rachel Carson".
  13. Stewart, Frank. A Natural History of Nature Writing. Island Press, 1995, p. 170. ISBN 1-55963-279-8.
  14. Quaratiello, p. 29.
  15. Quaratiello, Arlene. Rachel Carson: A Biography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 26–27. ISBN 0-313-32388-7.
  16. Hedgpeth, Joel (March 1956). "Review: Under the Sea Wind. A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life. by Rachel L. Carson". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 31: 40–41. doi:10.1086/401182 – via JSTOR.
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