Darger was born in 1892. While he is believed to have been born on April 12, the exact date is debated. His “Draft Registration Card” for the First World War, which was filled out on June 2, 1917, and is online at ancestry.com [2] gives the date as April 17, 1892. Cook County records show that he was born at home, at 350 24th Street. When he was four years old, his mother, Rose (née Fullman), died after having given birth to a daughter who was given up for adoption; Henry Darger never knew his sister.[3] Darger’s biographer, the art historian and psychologist John M. MacGregor, discovered that Rose had had two children before Henry, but their whereabouts are unknown.[4]
One of the three known photographs of Henry Darger, taken by David Berglund
One of the three known photographs of Henry Darger[1], taken by David Berglund

By Darger’s own report, his father, Henry Sr., was kind to him, and they lived together until 1900. In that year the crippled and impoverished Darger Sr. had to be taken to live at St. Augustine’s Catholic Mission home, and his son was placed in a Catholic boys’ home. Darger Sr. died in 1905, and his son was institutionalized in Lincoln, Illinois, with the diagnosis, according to Stephen Prokopoff, that “Little Henry’s heart is not in the right place.” According to John MacGregor the diagnosis was actually “self-abuse,” which A. M. Holmes takes as a euphemism for masturbation, rather than as meaning self-injury.

Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies and becoming a smart-aleck as a result. He also went through a lengthy phase of feeling compelled to make strange noises (akin to Tourette Syndrome), which irritated others. The Lincoln asylum’s practices included forced labor and severe punishments, which Darger seems to have worked into In the Realms of the Unreal. He later said that, to be fair, there were also good times there, he enjoyed some of the work, and he had friends as well as enemies. While he was there, he received word that his father had died. A series of attempted escapes ended successfully in 1908. According to his autobiography, he walked back to Chicago, and it was on this journey that he witnessed a huge tornado which devastated the south-central Illinois area. He described it as “a wind convulsion of nature tremendous beyond all man’s conception” .[5] [6] The 16-year old returned to Chicago and, with the help of his godmother, found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself for the next 50 years.

Except for a brief stint in the U.S. Army, his life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended Catholic Mass daily, frequently returning for as many as five services; he collected and saved a bewildering array of trash from the streets. His dress was shabby although he attempted to keep his clothes clean and mended. He was largely solitary; his one close friend, William Shloder, was of like mind with Darger on the subject of protecting abused and neglected children, and the pair proposed founding a “Children’s Protective Society” that would put such children up for adoption to loving families. Shloder left Chicago sometime in the mid-1930s, but he and Darger stayed in touch through letters until Shloder’s death in 1959.

In 1930, Darger settled into a second-floor room on Chicago’s North Side. It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in 1973, that Darger’s extraordinary secret life was discovered.

Darger’s landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, came across his work shortly before his death, a day after his birthday, on April 13, 1973 and recognized its merit. By this time Darger was in the Catholic mission, St. Augustine’s, where his father had died, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Lerners took charge of the Darger estate, publicizing his work and contributing to projects such as the 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. He has become internationally recognized thanks to the efforts of the people he knew to save his works.

Darger has become a famous name in the world of outsider art. At the Outsider Art Fair, held every January in New York City, and at auction, his work is among the highest-priced of any self-taught artist. The American Folk Art Museum, New York City, opened a Henry Darger Study Center in 2001, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago has a permanent exhibit recreating his apartment.