Before Carson turned to writing books, she had spent much of her career as a marine biologist at the federal Bureau of Fisheries, the kind of job that would now likely be DOGE’d. By the fifties, she had earned enough from her best-sellers to write full time, but she was taking care of her mother; also, she had breast cancer, which required a full mastectomy. But she worked steadily on “Silent Spring,” presenting it to Shawn in January, 1962; he responded, “You have made it literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.”