Environmentalist RACHEL CARSON

She was always a writer, and she always knew that. Like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, Millay and E.B. White, 10-year-old Rachel Louise Carson, born in 1907 in the Allegheny Valley town of Springdale, Pa., was first published in the St. Nicholas literary magazine for children. A reader and loner and devotee of birds, and indeed all nature, the slim, shy girl of plain face and dark curly hair continued writing throughout adolescence, chose an English major at Pennsylvania College for Women and continued to submit poetry to periodicals. Not until junior year, when a biology course reawakened the "sense of wonder"...