Henry Joseph Darger Jr. ( ; April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American janitor and hospital worker. He gained recognition only after his death for his vast body of visual art and writing.
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 the then-named Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children 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 United States 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 each 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 landlords Kiyoko and Nathan Lerner discovered his artwork and writings, which he had created and kept secret over the course of decades.
From around the early 1910s to the late 1930s, Darger wrote the 15,145-page novel In the Realms of the Unreal, centered on a rebellion of child slaves on a fantastical planet. The chief protagonists are the Vivian Girls, who fight to free the children from the enslaving Glandelinians. Inspired by the American Civil War and martyrdom stories, it features lengthy, gruesome descriptions of battles, many ending with the mass killing of rebel children. Between 1912 and 1925, Darger produced collages, often only loosely correlated to the book. Later he made these with watercolors and traced figures taken from popular sources such as magazines and children's books. These paintings grew more elaborate over time, with some of his largest works exceeding in length. Little girls, often in combat, are a primary focus; 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 In the Realms of the Unreal entitled Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago, a decade-long daily weather journal, and The History of My Life—consisting of a 206-page autobiography followed by several thousand pages about the destruction caused by a fictional Illinois tornado.
Darger made no efforts to publish his work, and it was unknown to others until shortly before his death. He is frequently associated with the outsider art movement, which encompasses the work of self-taught creators outside the mainstream art community who frequently produce very singular and unusual work. His art was popularized by his former landlords and is now featured in many museum collections, with the largest at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and the Intuit Art Museum in Chicago. Initial critical analysis of him and his work took a psychoanalytical approach, often focused on his many depictions of nude and brutalized children. Scholars have hypothesized several different psychological conditions Darger may have suffered from. Theories from earlier scholars that he was a pedophile or murderer have been discredited.
Biography
Childhood Henry Joseph Darger Jr. was born on April 12, 1892, in Chicago, Illinois, to Rosa () and Henry Darger. His father was a German immigrant born in Meldorf, who (despite physical disability) worked as a tailor. Rosa, from Wisconsin, was a housewife. Later in life, the younger Darger frequently claimed that he was a Brazilian born in São Paulo with the surname Dagarius, although there is no evidence of this. In April 1895, his mother died of an infection shortly after giving birth to his sister. His sister was put up for adoption; Darger recounted that he had never seen her or known her name. Darger remained in the care of his father, who he later recalled as a "kind and easy-going man". Darger described initially hating children younger than him and bullying them, which he retrospectively attributed to a lack of siblings; however, he wrote that he grew deeply fond of children later in life.
Darger attended grade school at Catholic schools. 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 engaged in physical fights with teachers and other children when about seven or eight years old. Once, he allegedly slashed 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, Illinois, but his father brought him home after only a short stay.
When Darger was eight years old, 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 to be put into a Catholic 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. The mission was locally nicknamed the "News Boys' Home" due to its practice of having its residents sell newspapers to pay for their stay.
Institutionalization Darger disliked the boys' home and fantasized about running away. His father visited him occasionally, and at one point attempted to have one of his relatives adopt him. Darger was successful academically but alienated his peers through what he described as "strange noises with my mouth, nose, and throat" and repetitive motions with his hand. His vocalizations had him briefly expelled from his elementary school, but he was readmitted with the support of his home's director. Despite his readmission, his caretakers seem to have viewed him as "feeble-minded" or insane. After a clinical examination in November 1904, Darger was institutionalized at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois. During the early 20th century, children in such facilities were expected to remain in the asylum system for life. An intake form prepared by a physician and his father described him as mentally deficient purely due to his "self-abuse" (masturbation), which was marked as having begun around age six.During Darger's time in the Lincoln Asylum, it had a population of about 1,200 children and a staff of over 500. The institution was marked by allegations of severe negligence and abuse toward its children, including one child who died from burns while unattended in a bathtub. Darger 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 every summer with around 50 boys to a state-owned farm (often called the State Farm) a short distance from the institution. 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". He was so uncomfortable with being relocated to the State Farm during the summer that he tried to run away. 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 brief 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 found work with a German farmer. When he no longer needed the boys as workers, they rode the Illinois Central Railroad to Decatur, Illinois. Darger decided to walk the roughly from Decatur back to Chicago, often at night due to hot weather and difficulties sleeping.
Career and adulthood Arriving in Chicago in August 1910, Darger stayed with his godmother, who helped him find work as a janitor at St. Joseph's Hospital, a Catholic hospital operated by the Sisters of Charity. He was tasked with cleaning both the hospital itself and the attached residences of its nuns. Darger was frequently mocked by the hospital's nuns (his supervisors) who believed he was insane. He recounted in his memoirs being unable to take time off when ill and being threatened with institutionalization by one of his supervisors. Around this time, he began writing fiction in his journals. He may have also made his first pieces of visual art (initially collages) alongside this, or a few years afterwards.
One or two years after his return to Chicago, Darger befriended William Schloeder, a Luxembourgish immigrant. Darger later recalling in his autobiography that he would often spend time together with "Willie" on weekends, often visiting amusement parks. Of the four known photographs of Darger, two show him accompanied by Schloeder, both 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, possibly seeking to raise a family with Schloeder. In 1929 and 1930, he typed two anonymous notes inquiring about the process; one of these declares that "since the year 1917 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. He was likely considered unsuitable for it due to his lack of a wife or property, and his low income. It is unknown whether he formally petitioned the church to adopt.
Following the United States in 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 as a dishwasher. He recounted working there through "years of misery" due to an intense dislike of his supervisor but being unable to quit 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 completed his first major written work, In the Realms of the Unreal, around the end of the 1930s. Over the following decade, he wrote an unfinished sequel and experimented with his visual art, greatly enlarging his canvases.