Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania and grew up on a family farm. It was on the Allegheny River, near Pittsburgh. Carson liked to read, and was a talented writer from an young age. She also spent a lot of time exploring around her farm. She began writing stories (often with animals in them) at age eight, and had her first story published at age eleven. She liked to read the "St. Nicholas Magazine", which published her first stories. It also published stories by Beatrix Potter, and the books of Gene Stratton Porter, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson. The natural world, particularly the ocean, was a common part of her favorite books. Carson graduated high school in 1925, at the top of her class of forty-four students.