To Helen Hoover and her husband Ade, the cabin and property on Gunflint Lake was idyllic, almost exactly what they’d wanted: leaving behind the bustling city of Chicago and trading the quiet beauty of northeastern Minnesota.
To the locals, there were many concerns about whether this couple would make it through their first winter. This is just one of the insights into the nature writer’s life from David Hakensen’s debut book Her Place in the Woods: the Life of Helen Hoover.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Hakensen explained how that first winter in 1954 proved rough for the Hoovers; having never experienced a Minnesota winter, they were woefully unprepared. They ran into issues with their food supply, keeping the cabin warm enough, and they even lost their car in an accident right before winter — but they persevered.
Eventually Helen started writing about Ade’s and her experiences and the wilderness they observed and interacted with daily. After having several articles published, Helen’s first book, The Long-Shadowed Forest, was published in 1963. She’d go on to publish seven adult and children’s books during her years in Minnesota and is considered a contemporary to nature writers like Sigurd Olson and Rachel Carson.
Hakensen paints a vivid picture of the intellectual and determined woman behind the books: her early career in the sciences, her tense relationship with her mother, the popularity of her books, and what drove her husband and her to eventually move on from Minnesota.
After 40 years in public relations, Hakensen explained he was inspired to write Her Place in the Woods after someone gave him a copy of Helen Hoover’s third book A Place in the Woods. He read it and then moved on to her other books, but realized a biography of her life didn’t exist, so he set about to write one. Though it is his first book, Hakensen found that his background in corporate communications helped in the writing.
“What I hope I brought to the biography is if you know Helen's work and you want to know a little bit more about her, that's great," Hakensen said. "But she also had this incredible career beforehand in metallurgy, where she received a couple of patents for her work and became very successful and then walked away from that to go live in the woods.”
Her Place in the Woods was recently named a finalist for the 2026 Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction. The winner will be announced at the Minnesota Book Awards ceremony on May 6.
Learn more about Her Place in the Woods, published by the University of Minnesota Press.
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