Rachel Carson, whose brave and lyrical Silent Spring set in motion the modern environmental movement, was an extremely private public figure. Her friendship with Dorothy Freeman was begun in 1953, when Carson was forty-six, after Freeman wrote to the already-famous author. Their friendship, formed around mutual love of the Maine seashore and on an almost immediate emotional recognition, quickly gained in intensity.

The friendship with Freeman became Carson's most important emotional haven and her richest source of creative support during the last twelve years of her life. Always, Rachel is first of all a record of a moving, complex, and sustained friendship between two women. It is the first revealing autobiographical writing we have from Carson.

1. The letters span the writing of The Edge of the Sea and of Silent Spring. They illuminate the creative turmoil Carson underwent as she wrote, her moments of despair and then of calm assurance that she had done what she imagined doing, and her sense of destiny as a writer.

Always, Rachel reveals for the first time the nearly crushing family and physical burdens under which Carson wrote Silent Spring - that she was dying of cancer as she was writing the book that was to change our view and use of environmental toxins.