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Henry Joseph Darger Jr. ( ; April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American janitor and hospital worker who became known after his death for his immense body of outsider art—art by self-taught creators outside the mainstream art community.
Darger was raised by his disabled father in Chicago. Frequently in fights, he was put into a charity home as his father's health declined, and in 1904 was sent to a children's asylum in Lincoln, Illinois, officially due to his masturbation. He began making escape attempts after his father's death in 1908, and in 1910 was able to escape, walking much of the way to Chicago. As an adult he did menial jobs for several hospitals, interrupted by a brief stint in the U.S. Army during World War I. He spent much of his life in poverty and in later life was a recluse in his apartment. A devout Catholic, Darger attended Mass multiple times per day and collected religious memorabilia. Retiring in 1963 due to chronic pain, he was moved into a charity nursing home in late 1972, shortly before his death. During this move, his landlord Nathan Lerner discovered his artwork and writings, which he had kept secret over decades of work.
From around 1910 to 1930, Darger wrote the 15,145 page novel The Realms of the Unreal, centered on a rebellion of Child slavery on a fantastical planet. The Vivian Sisters, the seven princesses of Abbeiannia, fight on behalf of the Christian nations against the enslaving Glandelinians. Inspired by the American Civil War and Christian martyr, it features gruesome descriptions of battles, many ending with the mass killing of rebel children. Between 1912 and 1925, Darger began producing accompanying Collage, often only loosely correlated to the book. Later he made watercolors with traced or Overpainting figures taken from magazines and children's books. These grew more elaborate over time, with some of his largest works approaching in length. Little girls, often in combat, are a primary focus of his work; for unknown reasons, they are frequently depicted naked and exclusively with male genitalia. Other writings by Darger include a roughly 8,000-page unfinished sequel to The Realms entitled Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House, a decade-long daily weather journal, and The History of My Life—consisting of a 206 page autobiography followed by 4,600 pages detailing a fictional tornado named "Sweetie Pie".
Darger's work was unknown to others until after his death, leading to his association with the outsider art movement. His artwork was popularized by his former landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, and are now featured in many museums' collections, with the largest at the New York American Folk Art Museum and the Chicago Intuit Art Museum. Darger and his work were subject to extensive critical analysis and psychobiography following his death, often focused on his depictions of nude and brutalized children. Scholars have assigned many different psychological conditions to Darger, although the initially-prevalent view that he was a pedophile or murderer has been discredited.
Darger attended grade school at Catholic schools operated by the local church. According to his later writings, he was able to transfer directly from first grade to third grade due to his ability to read. Relatively isolated, he often got into physical fights with teachers and other children when about seven or eight, allegedly slashing a teacher's arms and face with a knife. At some point, his poor behavior resulted in legal trouble, and he was moved to a "certain boys' home" in Morton Grove, but was taken home by his father after only a short stay. When Darger was eight, around 1900, his father's physical health declined further, and he became unable to work or take care of his son. Darger's uncles paid for his father's to be put into a poorhouse, while Darger was baptized and put in the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, a church-run home for homeless and orphaned boys. As the home was far away from any of the city's Catholic schools, Darger began attending public elementary school.
During Darger's time in the Lincoln Asylum, it had a population of about 1,200 children and a staff of over 500. He was grouped into the higher functioning category of children at the asylum and made to attend school. Although he occasionally suffered physical punishments for misbehavior, he reported that he eventually "got to like the place", noting various friends he made there. When he was about thirteen, he began to be dispatched to a state-owned farm (often called the State Farm) a short distance from the institution every summer with around fifty boys. They were tasked with farm work six days a week. Darger recounted that he enjoyed the work at the farm, but disliked being away from the asylum, which he viewed as his home.
Darger was greatly affected by the news of his father's death on March 1, 1908. He reported being in a state of mourning for several months after, spending all of his time alone "in a state of ugliness of such nature that everyone avoided me". That summer, he began trying to escape the institution. After a brief failed attempt to run away from the farm in June, he was able to escape by freighthopping with another boy from the asylum and return to Chicago. Shortly afterwards, he was caught in a storm and turned himself in to the police, who brought him back to the asylum. After another attempt the following year, he made his fourth and final attempt to escape in 1910. Darger and two other boys from the institution ran away from the State Farm and briefly found work with a German farmer. When he had no more work to give, the three rode the Illinois Central Railroad to Decatur. Darger decided to walk the roughly back to Chicago, often at night due to hot weather and difficulties sleeping.
One or two years after his return to Chicago, Darger met a Luxembourgish immigrant named William Schloeder. The two became friends, with Darger later recalling in his autobiography that he would often spend times together with "Willie" on weekends, often going to amusement parks. Out of the four known photographs of Darger, two of them show him accompanied by Schloeder, each at a fake caboose photo set located at Riverview Park. Darger and Schloeder may have been part of a "child-protection society" named the Gemini or the Black Brothers Lodge. Featured in a fictionalized form in Darger's work, the group appears to have done little actual work. Its existence is attested through an improvised membership certificate and a letter seemingly addressed to Darger discussing several members of the society and his "Lincoln friends", probably referring to the facility in which he was kept.
Darger made some attempts to adopt a child. In 1929 and 1930, he typed two anonymous notes inquiring about the process; one of these declares that "since the year nineteen-seventeen he has constantly prayed for a means as it is called for his hopes of adopting little children". From the context in the notes, he appears to have consulted a priest about the process of adopting a child, and was likely considered unsuitable for it due to his lack of a wife, property, and his low income. It is unknown if he formally petitioned the church to adopt.
Following the United States' entry into World War I, Darger was drafted into the army in September 1917. He completed two months of basic training at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois as a private of the 32nd Infantry Division. That November, he was sent to the Camp Logan training camp in Texas. Before the end of the year, he was honorably discharged from the military for vision problems, and he returned to work at St. Joseph's. In 1922, Darger quit work at the hospital due to poor treatment of him by one of the nuns. He found work at the secular Grant Hospital the following day. During this time, he stayed with a German immigrant family, the Anschutzs, who operated a boarding house out of their home. Six years later, Darger returned to working at St. Joseph's, now employed as a dishwasher. He recounted working there through "years of misery" due to an intense dislike of his supervisor, but being unable to quit his position due to the mass unemployment and poor job market of the Great Depression. In 1932, he moved up the street to a rooming house, renting two small rooms on the third floor of the building.
He was let go from his job as a dishwasher in 1947; a supervisor told him that the nurses had grown concerned that the working conditions had become too difficult for him, and allowed him to continue eating lunch at the hospital until he could find a new job. A week later, he was hired at a hospital ran by the Alexians (a Catholic order), where he continued working as a dishwasher, albeit with shorter hours. At some point, the hospital installed a new dishwasher to be staffed only by women. He was initially tasked with instead washing pots, but the hot conditions caused heat illness, and he was switched to a job cutting vegetables for the kitchen.
Darger was seen as a good worker and was given multiple pay increases, but began to face difficulties due to the onset of chronic pain in one of his knees, and he was switched to a simpler job winding bandages. Infuriated towards God for the pain, he began to curse and yell at the deity, at one point shaking his fist at Heaven. He stopped attending Mass, and described "badly singing awfully blasphemous words at God" for hours during hard shifts at work. At some point, he read an illustrated magazine story about an outlaw being condemned to Hell and tortured; this frightened him into attending Mass daily and frequenting confession.
In 1956, his rooming house was sold to new owners, photographer Nathan Lerner and his wife Kiyoko Lerner. Initially frightened that he might be evicted, Nathan assured him that he continue living in his unit. In November 1963, Darger retired due to his worsening chronic pain. He disliked retirement, writing that it was a "lazy life". Darger was in poverty throughout his life; he probably never made over 3,000$ in any year. His poverty only worsened following his retirement; reliant on his Social Security income, he was no longer able to eat meals at the hospital, and had to frequent nearby restaurants due to a lack of kitchen in his unit. The Lerners were reportedly defensive of him as a tenant, despite suggestions from other landlords that they evict him. One year as a Christmas present, they lowered his monthly rent from 40$ to 30$. Darger was a recluse in his unit; the Lerners mainly rented to young artists and musicians. Although he rarely socialized with his housemates, they frequently brought him food and cared for him when he was ill.
The Lerners initially sought to expand Darger's apartment into a rentable unit. They hired David Berglund, another of his tenants, to help clean Darger's apartment as he was moving to the care facility. In November or early December of 1972, Berglund discovered three bound volumes of his illustrations. Shortly afterwards, another collection of artworks (mainly collages) was discovered in a trunk. Darger reportedly told Berglund to "throw it all away" when approached about the artwork, with Kiyoko later recalling that he had told them "I don't want anything, they're of no use to me anywhere." After discarding a very large amount of accumulated trash (such as eighty pairs of broken eyeglasses), the Lerners discovered his artwork and began to sort through his belongings. Kiyoko likened the process to a "Mayan excavation". Impressed by his collages and illustrations, they sorted through the room over the following month, taking some pieces of his artwork home.
On April 13, 1973, one day after his 81st birthday, Darger died at his nursing home; this was the same building his father had died in. He was buried at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois. Initially buried in a paupers' grave, the Lerners purchased a gravestone declaring him an artist and protector of children and installed it at the site in 1996.
From December 31, 1957 to December 31, 1967, Darger kept a (generally) daily weather journal entitled Weather Reports. By its conclusion, this journal encompassed six notebooks, with later volumes often dedicating one page for each day. In addition to recording temperatures and weather conditions throughout the day, Darger frequently highlights the discrepancies of the local weathermen's predictions to the actual conditions; the third volume gained the subtitle " Truthful or Contrary of Weatherman’s Reports".
Described by Darger scholar John MacGregor as "unquestionably the longest work of fiction ever written", In The Realms of the Unreal comprises thirteen or fourteen typed volumes totaling 15,145 pages. The individual volumes range from 364 to 2164 pages, with their pagination sometimes inconsistent with the actual number of pages in the volume. The first seven volumes are bound; Darger stopped about halfway through the process of arranging and binding, leaving many volumes of the book unbound. They are only numbered up to eleven (including the two-part volume ten); two unlabeled volumes tentatively numbered twelve and thirteen (also known as Volume B) by scholars are the apparent final volumes of the story. Another shorter volume, dubbed Volume A, is largely unpaginated with pages extremely out of order, and includes a fragmentary chapter with an unclear place in the story.
A number of handwritten volumes within Darger's collected writings are also associated with the series. Many of these are simply handwritten versions of material which was later transcribed and included within the typed volumes, although a two-part handwritten manuscript contains a greatly expanded version of a battle featured in volume two. Having no experience in bookbinding, Darger improvised using materials such as glue, cardboard, newspaper, and rags. He used a variety of paper sizes, colors, and thicknesses as typing papers, resulting in greatly uneven pages. He also reused flyers and notebooks (most likely Dumpster diving) which at times still bear their previous unrelated text.
The plot of In The Realms of the Unreal centers on a great war taking place on a fictional planet a thousand times larger than Earth. Abbeiannia and Glandelinia, the primary nations featured, are described as having "hundreds of trillions of men, and many trillions of women and children". Motivated against the evil Glandelinians' use of child slavery, a coalition of Christian nations (Abbieannia alongside Calverinia and Angelina) fight against them in a devastating conflict lasting four years. The Vivian Girls, the seven young princesses of Abbieannia, are the chief protagonists of the story. Paralleling the American Civil War (
The story has two separate endings, both included in the unbound Volume B. In the first, used if the photo of Annie Aronburg was found, has the Christian forces defeating and capturing the Glandelinian General Manley, while the alternate ending has Manley escape and rally his troops to repel the Christian armies from the country.
The book only briefly and indirectly mentions his artistic works, complaining that he "cannot hardly stand on my feet because of my knee to paint on the top of the long picture".
During the 1930s, Darger produced single-sheet drawings of characters, flags, and creatures from the Realms. Likely believing that he would be unable to draw the human figures properly, he inserted figures into his illustrations using his collection of images (often young girls) cut out from magazines, comics, calendars, and coloring books. He traced over images using carbon paper and colored them, at times making modifications. He frequently rendered the girls as nude or partially-clothed, and consistently depicted them with male genitals. He never mentioned this seeming Intersex or Transgender within the story or gave an explanation for why it occurs. When describing the girls' physical appearances, he seems preoccupied by emphasizing their purity and beauty.
Nude characters appear more often in his work dating to the 1940s, accompanying a greater frequency of long Panorama scenes. His early panoramas featured multiple of his older narrative compositions on the verso, which were connected together to create a surface on which a long continuous recto side, which could be either horizontally or vertically-oriented. By the 1950s and 1960s, much of his artwork appeared to have no relation to the story, and he again began to depict clothed figures (often wearing Pinafore dress) more often than nude.
American comics of the early 20th century frequently centered on children and families. Darger clipped from various comics (including Winnie Winkle and Abbie an' Slats) as references, but had a particular fondness for Little Annie Rooney, which became the main source from which he traced the Vivian girls. Tracing and modifying Enlarger of the strips to draw characters, he also ordered hand-colored enlargements which he hung on the walls of his apartment. Although the use of cut-outs is common among many other Outsider art (self-taught artists who exist outside of the mainstream art community), Darger's exclusive use of them to populate his drawings is quite unique.
Darger's reliance on bricolage for his art also extends to his written work. Entire chapters of In The Realms of the Unreal are taken from other works with slight modification; appropriated works include the 17th century Christian text The Pilgrim's Progress and the 1920s adventure novel The Flaming Forest. Although he read a wide variety of books, he likely wrote more material than he read. Darger's writing style show some influence from Victorian children's literature, using relatively basic prose interrupted occasionally by more ornate expressions. He borrowed characters and situations from children's books such as Heidi, Bobbsey Twins, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as comics such as Mutt and Jeff. The literary scholar Michael Moon described Don Quixote, The Pilgrim's Progress, the Oz series, and Uncle Tom's Cabin as the most influential books on Darger and his work.
Some scholars have theorized that Darger was homosexual or transgender. He likely had some familiarity with homosexuality—he owned the 1928 book Condemned to Devil's Island, which portrays sexual relationships between men—and frequently featured crossdressing male and female characters in his works. Art critic Michael Bonesteel theorized that the depiction of girls with male genitalia may point to Darger having had gender dysphoria. Further Adventures in Chicago features a male character who wishes he was born female, on which Darger comments that he himself "knows quite a number of boys who would give anything to have been born a girl".
Later scholarship on Darger has generally dismissed the view that Darger was a pedophile or murderer. Moon dismissed a sexual interpretation of his work, arguing that there was likely little connection between his sexuality and his depictions of violence. Moon noted that MacGregor almost exclusively focused on Darger's alleged sadism, never exploring the potential for an origin of the depictions in masochism or childhood trauma. In 2013, Elledge published a biography of Darger titled Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy; Elledge argues that Darger was exploited as a child prostitute and sexually victimized throughout his youth. Bonesteel also theorized that Darger was sexually abused while institutionalized, although noted that much of Elledge's biography elaborated on spurious evidence and mixed fact with fiction.
Darger claimed to have been given the nickname "Crazy" by other students during elementary school. According to Moon, it is impossible to posthumously determine whether he was sane or insane; he describing him as "very productively unreasonable" and his work as far more influenced by the historical material and Pulp magazine he had access to than by his mental state. He theorized that Darger's frequent depiction of violence against young girls might have its origins in the frequent depictions of such acts in media coverage of lynchings and race riots during his childhood.
Darger's illustrations have become more well-known than his writings. These have never been published beyond brief excerpts, and their enormous length and idiosyncratic style has deterred extensive literary analysis. He was the subject of a 2004 documentary by Jessica Yu entitled In the Realms of the Unreal, which features interviews with his neighbors and Kiyoko Lerner.
None of Darger's works had been registered with the United States Copyright Office by the time of his death. In 1995, the copyright of Darger's work was claimed by Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner. Since Nathan's death in 1997, it has been claimed by Kiyoko Lerner and managed by the Artists Rights Society, a licensing organization. Following a 2019 article in the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property which called the Lerners' claim to the copyright into question, art collector Ron Slattery tracked down Darger's surviving relatives (mainly first cousins two or three times removed). A group of these relatives contested Lerner's ownership in a 2022 federal lawsuit.
The largest collection of Darger's works is held by the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in New York. Acquired in 2000, the AFAM collection contains the original manuscripts of all three of his major works, his weather report journal, a planning journal used to keep track of characters and events in In The Realms of the Unreal, more than sixty of his paintings and collages, and various sketches, source materials, and personal records. Also in 2000, the Intuit Art Museum (a Chicago museum specializing in outsider art) took possession of the contents of Darger's former apartment, including many of his sketches, source materials, and furnishings. These were moved to the museum and incorporated into a replica of the apartment, which opened as the Henry Darger Room Collection in 2008. The Lerners donated some of his pieces to various other museums, including the Collection de l'art brut (a Swiss museum specializing in outsider art), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2012–2013, Kiyoko Lerner donated forty-five pieces to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, possibly on the condition that the museum also display a collection of Nathan Lerner's photography. Acquired from this collection, the Centre Pompidou in Paris holds six of his painted panels. The Museum of Everything, a touring exhibition of self-taught and outsider artists, has frequently showcased Darger's work.
Kiyoko Lerner made microform copies of Darger's writings during the 1990s. A digitized version of these is hosted online by the Illinois State Library.
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