Helen Hoover

Helen Hoover was an American nature writer who wrote four popular adult books and three books for the juvenile market in the 1960s and 1970s. She and her husband Adrian, an illustrator of her books, moved from Chicago to a remote cabin in northern Minnesota in 1954, which became the source of material for her books.

Early life and career Hoover had an unconventional career for a woman. Born January 20, 1910, in Greenville, Ohio, Hoover was the daughter of Thomas Franklin and Hannah Gomersall Blackburn. She attended Ohio University from 1927 to 1929, until her father died suddenly in 1929. She and her mother moved to Chicago out of economic necessity, where Helen sought work as an addressograph operator and as a proofreader. During World War II, she was able to get a job as an analytical chemist with Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory and also took night courses at De Paul University and the University of Chicago. Following the war, she was able to continue in this field, working at Ahlberg Bearing Company as a metallurgist from 1945 to 1948. In 1948 she became a research metallurgist at International Harvester Co., where her work earned her a patent for agricultural implement disks.

While in Chicago, she met Adrian Everett Hoover, an artist, and they were married in 1937.

Move to the North Woods "We moved to our log cabin on the Canadian border of Minnesota, and there, under the grim necessity of earning money or starving, I began to write seriously... articles on the natural world around us." From 1959 to 1969 Hoover was a regular contributor to Humpty Dumpty magazine and wrote the "Wilderness Chat" column for Defenders of Wildlife News from 1963 to 1973. She was a contributor of features and articles to Audubon, American Mercury, Gourmet, Organic Gardening and Farming, Saturday Review, Living Wilderness and Woman's Journal (London). It was through contacts made through writing for children's and nature magazines that she received her first book contract.

List of Works The Long-Shadowed Forest (1963) The Gift of the Deer (1966) Animals at My Doorstep (juvenile, 1966) Great Wolf and the Good Woodsman (juvenile, 1967) A Place in the Woods (1969) Animals Near and Far (juvenile, 1970) The Years of the Forest (1973)