Featured Article Summary #99

Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was an American janitor and hospital worker who became famous only after his death for a huge body of artwork and writing. Raised in Chicago by his disabled father, he was later sent to a children’s asylum after his father’s health worsened, and after his father died he managed to escape and return toward Chicago. As an adult he worked low-paying jobs in hospitals, lived in poverty, and spent much of his later life alone while practicing Catholicism and collecting religious items. For decades he secretly created an enormous novel, In the Realms of the Unreal, plus many related drawings and writings, filled with stories of child slavery, religious conflict, and extremely violent battles. He made no efforts to publish, so his work stayed unknown until his landlords found it shortly before his death, after which it helped bring attention to outsider art. Later critics initially studied his work through psychology, but ideas that he was a pedophile or murderer have since been rejected. Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892 to Rosa and Henry Darger, a German immigrant tailor. His mother died in 1895 after giving birth to his sister, who was adopted out, and Darger later described a childhood shaped by his father’s care and his own growing attachment to other children. He attended Catholic school but often had conflicts, including violent behavior that led to legal trouble and a brief stay in a boys’ home. After his father’s health worsened around 1900, Darger was placed in a church-run mission for homeless and orphaned boys, where residents sold newspapers to pay for their stay before he moved to public school. Darger disliked the boys’ home and struggled socially, with odd vocal noises and hand movements that led to suspensions and low regard from caregivers. After a clinical exam in 1904, he was institutionalized at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where children were expected to stay for life; the asylum faced serious allegations of neglect and abuse, and Darger spent time in schooling and farm labor. When his father died in 1908, Darger became deeply distressed, repeatedly tried to escape from the state farm, and finally ran away for good in 1910, working briefly with a farmer before walking back toward Chicago. In Chicago, Henry Darger worked around hospitals, especially St. Joseph’s, where he was often treated harshly and even mocked by nuns who thought he was mentally ill. He wrote fiction and made visual art while working, formed close friendships (including with William Schloeder), and even tried to explore adoption, though he likely wasn’t considered eligible. During World War I he served in the army but was discharged due to vision problems, and after years of difficult hospital jobs, he developed chronic pain that strongly affected his faith and life. Darger was repeatedly pushed out of or changed jobs due to his health, and later retired in 1963. He lived in poverty, depended on Social Security, and relied on help from his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, especially after Schloeder’s death in 1959. In his final years he became more isolated but continued writing, completing his last major work, The History of My Life, in the late 1960s. In 1969 and again in 1972, Darger was seriously injured and had trouble moving around. The Lerners arranged for him to live with the Little Sisters of the Poor, and while helping him transition, one of their tenants discovered bound volumes, collages, and many journals, which Darger reportedly told them to throw away but they instead began to preserve and study. Darger died on April 13, 1973, shortly after his 81st birthday, and was buried in Illinois. He was first placed in a pauper’s grave, but in 1996 the Lerners replaced it with a gravestone calling him an artist and protector of children.