Name: David Hakensen for Her Place in the Woods
Start: 2026-02-26T19:00:00-06:00
Location: 318 North Central Ave, Duluth, MN, United States, Minnesota 55807

David Hakensen for Her Place in the Woods

Have you ever dreamed of living off the grid? Escaping city life and moving north into the woods? Then you will enjoy David Hakensen’s presentation on Thursday, February 26th 7 PM at Zenith Bookstore. He will discuss his biography Her Place in the Woods: The Life of Helen Hoover (University of Minnesota Press), answer questions, and personally sign books. This is a wonderful event for all nature lovers, so invite a few friends!
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 were published in popular magazines and several bestselling books (including The Gift of the Deer in 1966 and A Place in the Woods in 1969). They found millions of fans and earned her accolades alongside nature writers like Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson, Sally Carrighar, and Calvin Rutstrum. 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 (1910–1984) made a place for herself and for countless readers in, as she put it, the world of her time.
“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 forty years of experience. He has served on several nonprofit boards and was board president of the Minnesota Historical Society.