New book focuses on the life and writing of Greenfield native Helen Hoover
During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover’s stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota’s Gunflint Lake, published in popular magazines and several bestselling books (including "The Gift of the Deer" in 1966 and "A Place in the Woods" in 1969), found millions of fans and earned her accolades alongside nature writers like Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson, Sally Carrighar and Calvin Rutstrum.
Hoover, who was born in 1910 in Greenfield, Ohio, studied chemistry at Ohio University, and became a research metallurgist for the International Harvester.
Hoover’s own unlikely history of leaving a corporate career in Chicago for a small cabin without electricity or running water – with no interest in hunting or fishing – is just one chapter of the remarkable life that David Hakensen describes in Her Place in the Woods.
This first complete biography illuminates how Helen Hoover (1910-84) made a place for herself and for countless readers in, as she put it, the world of her time.
Hoover defied convention. Self-trained and without an academic degree, she worked in the male-dominated metallurgical field as a researcher at International Harvester, where she solved a longstanding problem with the manufacture of discs for farm implements and earned a patent.
She and her husband, Adrian, a commercial artist, had long dreamed of moving to a remote cabin in the woods. As they started the long return drive to Chicago after a summer spent on Gunflint Lake, they finally made the leap, quitting their jobs with a long-distance phone call from Grand Marais and figuring out the rest as they went.
The Hoovers were woefully unprepared for life off the grid and slowly learned how to convert sheds into chicken coops and fend off bears. Social encounters presented their own challenges, with Helen’s fiery personality leading to clashes with hunters and other Gunflint neighbors.
Gradually, the Hoovers settled into the rhythms of their remote homestead, and Helen would craft a prolific literary livelihood from her keen observations of nature and encounters with animals in the surrounding woods.
"Her Place in the Woods" captures both an awakening to the power and fragility of the natural world and the efforts and talents of an extraordinary woman defining herself as a writer. Though Helen Hoover would move on from the secluded North Woods, as she wrote in her final book, "The Years of the Forest," “From this time on, it would be both here and with me wherever I might be, as long as I should live.”
"David Hakensen’s engaging, well-researched biography of American nature writer Helen Hoover details her years of near-primitive immersion in the northern Minnesota wilderness, the weather and wildlife that gave rise to each of her books, and finally, the conditions that forced her and her husband to abandon their paradise.
"Her Place in the Woods" is a compelling portrait of an uncompromising artist. It is an excellent companion to her works and will surely assist a long-overdue Helen Hoover revival," – Ann McCutchan, author of "The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of 'The Yearling.'"
David Hakensen is an award-winning public relations executive with more than 40 years of experience. He has served on several nonprofit boards and was board president of the Minnesota Historical Society.
For more information visit: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517911683/her-place-in-the-woods/
– Courtesy of Heather Skinner
Publicist
University of Minnesota Press
presspr@umn.edu