BOOK: The Life of Helen Hoover in the Northern Woods

The wilderness of northern Minnesota has inspired generations and rooted diverse communities in a deep and timeless relationship with the land. Affecting a unique legacy of naturalism and literature, the search for human connection with the environment has inspired local authors and readers alike. As cycles of human-exacerbated environmental threats persist, literature offers a reflective opportunity to learn from the past and consider challenges we face today. 

Published in September 2025 (University of Minnesota Press), David Hakensen’s new biography, Her Place in the Woods, examines the life of nature writer Helen Hoover, lifting up her prolific, yet under-appreciated, career.

Hoover was born in Ohio on January 20, 1910. She established herself as a uniquely warm and distinctive nature writer, starting with the first major publication of one of her short stories in Audubon in 1958. She was active as a writer until her death in 1984. 

 

 

Life and Career Switch in her 40s

Hoover found success as a metallurgist for International Harvester early in her science career, but she was an outsider in the corporate, male-dominated field. She considered herself a creative scientist, but she was limited by the stifling environment of the company. Hakensen writes that the “back-to-the-land narratives” that captured readers’ attentions during the mid- to late 1940s — namely Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods and John Rowlands’ Cache Lake Country — inspired Hoover as she became disillusioned by her big city life and corporate research job. 

With her mother’s passing when Hoover was 44, she and her husband Ade decided to leave city life in Chicago behind. They moved to Minnesota in 1954, settling on the Gunflint Trail in the North Woods, which at that time was almost entirely pure of tourism and residential development. The Hoovers struggled to survive the first bleak and unforgiving winter, but they were determined to live the life they wanted in harmony with nature, despite financial worry. “Helen adopted the optimistic motto that ‘something will turn up,’” Hakensen writes. 

Hoover turned to writing newsletters to keep in touch with family and friends, offering observations about their new day-to-day life and prominently featuring the animals she encountered on her property. “Hoover was intent on learning how humans and animals could coexist,” Hakensen writes. 

She began to consider magazine writing as a way to make money because of the enthusiastic responses to her detailed naturalistic newsletter reports. Her modest life in the North Woods, and her growing connections with local wildlife — specifically a deer that she affectionately named Peter — became the basis for her first short stories. 

Hoover decided to turn her musings into a book after the growing success of her short stories, which were picked up by national publications including the children’s magazine Humpty Dumpty. In 1963, The Long Shadowed Forest was published as a guidebook about the Minnesota forest and its animals, intertwining vivid descriptions of the physical landscape of the North Woods with vignettes featuring her eccentric friendships with the shrews, mice, and deer that she and Ade considered neighbors. 

Hakensen includes Hoover’s potent description of dawn on a Minnesota lake to illustrate her verve: “The first light reveals the trees and brush as greenish-gray shapes, like amorphous, primordial predecessors to themselves. … Somewhere a bird chirps, a squirrel sputters into a lively argument with itself, gulls pass like shadows overhead, and the eastern sky flushes with pink.” 

Hakensen also includes an excerpt of Hoover’s anti-hunting commentary, “With My Bow And Arrow,” published in 1962: “Ade and I do not kill things, and this is sometimes called sentimental in a derogatory way. … But we see nothing brave in callousness, nor maudlin in gentleness. Respect for life itself is an all-important need of mankind. If men had that respect, the deadly atomic blasts which pollute the air and threaten the world would never have come to pass.” 

Hakensen understands that hunting is a time-honored activity in Minnesota, and he effectively weaves in context for the local political division that Hoover participated in during the 1960s. She lived through a significant time of transition in Grand Marais as the long untouched and unadulterated wilderness had become a place fraught with political and commercial tension that persists today, especially related to the establishment of the Boundary Waters Wilderness and Canoe Area as federally protected wilderness in 1964. 

Criticized for “participating emotionally,” in her tales of the outdoors, as one New York Times reviewer put it, Hoover’s work was deeply political as well as personal. At times, Hoover and her husband were seriously at odds with their neighbors in Grand Marais, as well as the hunters who poached their animal friends. Hoover seems to discover, in Hakensen’s depiction, that there is a choice to be made between developing a better relationship with the earth or sustaining a relationship with society. 

Hakensen makes the case that Hoover’s unique style established a new tone and imaginative potential for nature writing. At times fictional and fantastical, and whether for adult or child audiences, Hoover’s work illustrates a curiosity for the natural world, told with humility and endearing genuineness. Transcending comparison between the political climates of the 1960s and today, as it relates to environmentalism, Her Place in the Woods provides an introspective dive into Hoover’s life and work, and has the possibility to inspire — with Hoover’s timeless vitality – reflections on our own relationships with the earth.