History Creator / HenryDarger

* CreatorBreakdown: One of Darger's most prized newspaper clippings that he used as a template for his drawings was a photograph of a murdered girl named [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_Paroubek Elsie Paroubek]], taken from the ''Chicago Daily News''. When he lost the photo, he built a shrine to Paroubek in his apartment -- he had several shrines for missing and exploited children over the years -- and petitioned God for the photo's safe return or a replacement. The story of the missing picture was worked right into the narrative, where Elsie was Annie Aronburg, a heroic leader in the child slave rebellion. When the photo didn't turn up, and when he was unable to find it in newspaper archives, Darger turned the war in ''Literature/InTheRealmsOfTheUnreal'' against the Christian child rebellion and ratcheted up the {{Gorn}} inflicted on his child protagonists. After he failed to adopt a child through a Catholic orphanage, Darger interpreted this as God punishing him for making the child characters miserable and later changed the narrative again. ''Realms'' ended up having two alternate endings, one where the Christian forces are triumphant and another where they are defeated.

* NoBudget: A rare example in visual art. Henry had to resort to tracing over photos of children and landscapes, which he would find along with art supplies while dumpster diving, for his illustrations since his hospital jobs couldn't afford him art lessons. (Careful examination of the papers found in his room show receipts from an art supply store, too.)
* RealitySubtext: Although he would always deny that he had suffered so greatly there, it's not hard to draw parallels between the evil Glandelinians violently enslaving children and the backbreaking child slavery and abuse that Darger himself suffered at the Asylum.

His gravestone can be found in Illinois. The headstone reads "Henry Darger, Artist and Protector of Children."

The specifics of his life story and history can be found on Wiki/ThatOtherWiki. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCS_u3Sgpg Fredrik Knudsen]] has an excellent rundown on [=YouTube=] as well.

* DeadArtistsAreBetter: Just barely averted. Shortly after he was moved into a nursing home, his landlords discovered the entirety of his massive library of work stacked up in his room. All of his neighbors visited him at the nursing home, and one of them complimented him on the incredible quality and breadth of his work. Darger was touched, but only replied "Too late now."

* NoBudget: A rare example in visual art. Henry had to resort to tracing over photos of children and landscapes, which he would find along with art supplies while dumpster diving, for his illustrations since his hospital jobs couldn't afford him art lessons.

His gravestone can be found in Illinois. The headstone reads "[[TearJerker Henry Darger, Artist and Protector of Children.]]"

* DeadArtistsAreBetter: Just barely averted. Shortly after he was moved into a nursing home, his landlords discovered the entirety of his massive library of work stacked up in his room. All of his neighbors visited him at the nursing home, and one of them complimented him on the incredible quality and breadth of his work. Darger was touched, but only replied "[[TearJerker Too late now.]]"[[invoked]]

* FaceHeelTurn: Darger turned his AuthorAvatar to the side of Glandelinia as part of his [[RageAgainstTheHeavens revolt against God]] after the loss of his prized photograph (see CreatorBreakdown above), but would eventually [[HeelFaceTurn return to the fold]].

* BedlamHouse: He spent a good chunk of his adolescence in a facility for "feebleminded children" (he called it a "children's nuthouse") where children were raped, beaten and exploited into performing non-stop farm labor. Darger and some of his friends ran away several times. Although while this did serve as inspiration for "Realms of the Unreal", he at one point [[invoked]][[AngstWhatAngst denied his suffering]], saying his life at the asylum had been "like in a sort of heaven" (perhaps compared to his later life).

The majority of his pictures are heroic portraits, ordinary action-adventure scenes, or colorful, flower-filled panoramas. However, the 1% of his output that covered the Glandelinian massacres are the ones that get the most attention. Because these horrific scenes were originally displayed ''without recourse to the contextual narrative'', many people didn't know what to make of Darger and some (including a famous psychiatrist) mistook him for a 1930s version of Jeffrey Dahmer. There is no evidence that Darger ever harmed a living soul.

Henry Joseph Darger (April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an outsider artist and author from Chicago. After losing his parents at an early age, he spent the majority of his childhood in a series of abusive [[OrphanageOfFear orphanages]] and [[BedlamHouse insane asylums]], and responded by [[HappyPlace creating an internal fantasy world]]. At sixteen, he escaped the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois, and walked 160 miles back to Chicago, finding work there as a janitor in a succession of Catholic hospitals. Apart from a short stint in the US Army during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, he lived quietly as a janitor and dishwasher all his life, hardly ever speaking in public and emerging from his apartment only to go to work and Mass. Eventually, he died in a nursing home in 1973. When cleaning out his apartment, his landlords found an immense treasure trove of artwork and stories that Darger had been working on for more than sixty years.

* AuthorPhobia: The real reason, often ignored by more sensationalistic sources, for the scenes in his work that showed children being tortured. Darger [[FriendToAllChildren adored children]], and depicted the villains as committing these gruesome acts because [[WouldHurtAChild hurting a child]] was the [[MoralEventHorizon most evil thing he could possibly think of.]] Having spent much of his childhood in a horrific BedlamHouse, he himself [[RealitySubtext was no stranger to uncaring adults who abused children.]]

* BedlamHouse: He spent a good chunk of his adolescence in a facility for "feebleminded children" (he called it a "children's nuthouse") where children were raped, beaten and exploited into performing non-stop farm labor. Darger and some of his friends ran away several times. Although while this did serve as inspiration for "Realms of the Unreal", he at one point [[AngstWhatAngst denied his suffering]], saying his life at the asylum had been "like in a sort of heaven" (perhaps compared to his later life).

* DeadArtistsAreBetter: Just barely averted. Shortly after he was moved into a nursing home, his landlords discovered the entirety of his massive library of work stacked up in his room. All of his neighbors visited him at the nursing home, and one of them complimented him on the incredible quality and breadth of his work. Darger was touched, but only replied "[[TearJerker Too late now.]]"

* DoorStopper: All of his writing is more than 4,000 pages long, and the vast majority of it was written ''longhand.''

* MadArtist: Albeit one who would not be perceived [[ValuesDissonance as so horribly deviant]] nowadays. It's unclear how he would have turned out had he not been spent so much time in the mental institutions as a child, given that he always denied being abused there.

* SelfAbuse: This is cited as the reason he was institutionalized. Of course, [[ValuesDissonance given the era]], it probably wasn't as bad as the authorities thought.
* WouldNotHurtAChild: Darger was very much this - despite what some people would have you think - and thus depicted scenes of the Glandelinians torturing and murdering children because hurting a child was [[MoralEventHorizon the most evil thing he could possibly think of]]. Darger spent a large portion of his childhood as a virtual slave at a horrible BedlamHouse, so he knew damn well [[RealitySubtext what it felt like for a child to be abused by uncaring adults.]]

Henry Joseph Darger (April 12, 1892–April 13, 1973) was an outsider artist and author from Chicago. After losing his parents at an early age, he spent the majority of his childhood in a series of abusive [[OrphanageOfFear orphanages]] and [[BedlamHouse insane asylums]], and responded by [[HappyPlace creating an internal fantasy world]]. At sixteen, he escaped the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois, and walked 160 miles back to Chicago, finding work there as a janitor in a succession of Catholic hospitals. Apart from a short stint in the US Army during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, he lived quietly as a janitor and dishwasher all his life, hardly ever speaking in public and emerging from his apartment only to go to work and Mass. Eventually, he died in a nursing home in 1973. When cleaning out his apartment, his landlords found an immense treasure trove of artwork and stories that Darger had been working on for more than sixty years.

* PublicDomainStories: Henry never filed a copyright claim for any of his works, leading them to fall into the public domain after his death.

* PublicDomainStories: Henry never filed a copyright claim for any of his works while alive, which lead them to fall under public domain after his death.

* PublicDomainStories: Since Henry's stories were sold off after his death and never published, they've naturally fallen into this.

* AmbiguousDisorder: While it is generally agreed that Darger was mentally ill to some degree, it is not known for certain what specific disorders he may have suffered from, to what extent he suffered from them, and how much they were reflected in his art. He mentions a compulsion to make "strange noises" (which Wiki/ThatOtherWiki speculates may have been symptoms of Tourette's syndrome), something that got him disciplined by his teachers and bullied by the other children. It's difficult to say whether Darger was severely mentally ill to begin with or whether his symptoms later in life were exacerbated by [[BedlamHouse the horrendous conditions in the asylums.]] He may also have simply been something of an eccentric child who ended up being slapped with the label of deviant anyway by a society that was [[ScienceMarchesOn unprepared]] [[SocietyMarchesOn and unwilling]] to make accommodations for him (an interpretation supported by the fact that the diagnosed reason for his being in the institution was "[[ADateWithRosiePalms self-abuse]]", which at the time was [[ValuesDissonance classified as a form of mental illness]]).

* MisunderstoodLonerWithAHeartOfGold: One of the quintessential examples. Despite the violent nature of the battles in ''The Realms of the Unreal'', there is no evidence that Darger ever harmed or was even ''rude'' to a single living person - the vast majority of his life was spent either going to work, mass, or the amusement park with [[OnlyFriend William Schloeder]], and the rest of the time holed up in his room, quietly working on his masterpieces for decades.

* ReclusiveArtist: Possibly the quintessential example. Aside from visiting the amusement parks with his OnlyFriend William Schloeder, working, and going to mass, drawing and writing was apparently Darger's sole occupation in life.

* BedlamHouse: He spent a good chunk of his adolescence in a facility for "feebleminded children" that pretty much exploited patients into performing non-stop farm labor and ran away from it several times. Although while this did serve as inspiration for "Realms of the Unreal" he at one point [[AngstWhatAngst denied his suffering]], calling it heaven.
* CreatorBreakdown: One of Darger's most prized newspaper clippings that he used as a template for his drawings was a photograph of a murdered girl named Elsie Paroubek, taken from the ''Chicago Daily News''. When he lost the photo, he built a shrine to Paroubek in his apartment -- he had several shrines for missing and exploited children over the years -- and petitioned God for the photo's safe return. The story of the missing picture was worked right into the narrative, where Elsie was Annie Aronburg, a heroic leader in the child slave rebellion. When the photo didn't turn up, and when he was unable to find it in newspaper archives, Darger turned the war in ''Literature/InTheRealmsOfTheUnreal'' against the Christian child rebellion and ratcheted up the {{Gorn}} inflicted on his child protagonists. After he failed to adopt a child through a Catholic orphanage, Darger interpreted this as God punishing him for making the child characters miserable and later changed the narrative again. ''Realms'' ended up having two alternate endings, one where the Christian forces are triumphant and another where they are defeated.

* BedlamHouse: Spent a good chunk of his adolescence in a facility for "feebleminded children" that pretty much exploited patients into performing non-stop farm labor and ran away from it several times. Although while this did serve as inspiration for "Realms of the Unreal" he at one point [[AngstWhatAngst denied his suffering]] calling it heaven.

* DeadArtistsAreBetter: Just barely averted. Shortly after he was moved into a nursing home, his landlords discovered the entirety of his massive library of work stacked up in his room. All of his neighbors visited him at the nursing home, and one of them complimented on the incredible quality and breadth of his work. Darger was touched, but only replied "[[TearJerker Too late now.]]"
* DisproportionateRetribution: Children, particularly in his stories about the Vivian Girls, are often punished, enslaved, tortured and murdered ForTheEvulz by Glandelinian authorities. A Civil War expert, Darger may have based some of this on slave narratives and on ''Literature/UncleTomsCabin'' which he referenced directly many times.

* FriendToAllChildren: Darger's heroes are protectors of children. Threats to children make up the bulk of his writing. He wanted to adopt a child, but couldn't; adoptions to single parents simply weren't done at that time, especially given his low income. His history of mental illness (at that time, having been in an insane asylum was in itself proof that you were insane) was probably also a factor.

* WouldNotHurtAChild: Darger was very much this - despite what some people would have you think - and thus depicted scenes of the Glandelinians torturing and murdering children because hurting a child was [[MoralEventHorizon the most evil thing he could possibly think of]]. Darger spent a large portion of his child as a virtual slave at a horrible BedlamHouse, so he knew damn well [[RealitySubtext what it felt like for a child to be abused by uncaring adults.]]