The New Yorker

The New Yorker was the sole magazine to accept Rachel Carson’s writing on pesticide damage after other publishers, wary of losing advertising, rejected the subject. Its decision to serialize parts of Silent Spring before the book’s publication gave Carson a platform for the account she had concluded she would have to write herself.

Editorial Context

A decade after her earlier efforts to interest magazines, Carson decided she had to speak out as pesticide and herbicide spraying—sometimes involving substances many times as toxic as DDT—was destroying wildlife and habitat and endangering human life. Though she was by then a well-known writer, magazine publishers turned her down because they feared the loss of advertising.

The Exception

The New Yorker was the exception. A manufacturer of canned baby food had argued that such an article would cause unwarranted fear among mothers who used his product, an example of the commercial pressure surrounding the subject. The magazine nevertheless agreed to publish portions of Carson’s work in advance of the book.

Role in Silent Spring

Carson first tried to find someone else to undertake the project, but eventually decided that if it was to be done, she would have to do it herself. With magazines otherwise closed to her, book publication offered a route beyond their advertising pressures; The New Yorker’s advance serialization was the one magazine opening in that path. Its role was not simply to carry an article: it helped bring Carson’s pesticide critique before readers before Silent Spring appeared as a book.