"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.
"[2] 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).
[2] Hoover's first book, The Long-Shadowed Forest (Thomas Crowell, 1963; University of Minnesota Press 1999), focused on the flora and fauna surrounding their cabin; it served as a basic guidebook to the northern woods.
Following the success of her books and the growing development around their cabin, the Hoover's left northern Minnesota to visit other parts of the U.S., moving to Taos, New Mexico, where an author and illustrator could live without attracting attention.
Written in the early 1960s but not published until 1963, Hoover also recognized the danger of DDT and detailed its harmful effects on wildlife at the same time Rachel Carson was making the same claim in her seminal work Silent Spring.