Before her landmark 1962 book Silent Spring catalyzed the environmental movement by alerting the world to the devastating effects of chemical pesticides, Rachel Carson achieved an international reputation as a “poet of the sea,” author of a trilogy of celebrated books about the world’s oceans. Lyrical, deeply personal, and rigorously researched, these three classics of American science and nature writing are now collected in this deluxe Library of America volume.

Under the Sea-Wind (1941), Carson’s stunning debut, offers an intimate account of the intricacies of maritime ecology, traced through a year in the lives of more than a dozen creatures of sea and shore—in particular, a sanderling, a mackerel, and an eel—as they interact amid the enduring ebb and flow of the tides. The fruit of years of study as a scientist for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Under the Sea-Wind fulfills Carson’s wish “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.”

The Sea Around Us (1951)—a National Book Award winner and international best seller—draws on a wealth of oceanographic, meteorological, biological, and historical research to present its subject on a grand, biospheric scale. Carson’s “biography of the sea” reveals many mysteries of the still-unfathomed depths, and an abiding reverence for the ocean as a source of global climate and of life itself.

The Edge of the Sea (1955) explores the small creatures that live where ocean meets land: the shorelines and tidepools accessible to any beachcomber. Part handbook, part hymn to ecological complexity, it is a book that conveys the sense of wonder in nature for which Carson is justly celebrated.

Carson’s Sea Trilogy is presented here with an introduction by writer and biologist Sandra Steingraber, a 16-page portfolio of photographs, a detailed chronology of Carson’s life and career, helpful notes, and an index.