Intuit took possession of all the items in Henry Darger's modest living space and recreated the room:
Henry Darger was an orphan, his mother dying while he was very young, his father impoverished and unable to care for him. He spent some time in an orphanage before being moved to a psychiatric asylum after his care-takers expressed "his heart was not right." There he was subjected to the forced labor and harsh punishments that exemplified institutions of this type in the early twentieth century.
He would later escape the asylum at the age of 16 and find employment with a Catholic Hospital as a janitor. He would work there until his retirement 51 years later.
It was in this time that Henry Darger took up residence in a room in Lincoln Park, not far from Du Paul university, and write the staggeringly long "In the Realms of the Unreal." This enormous work was typed on 15,145 pages and comprised fifteen weighty volumes. These are accompanied by detailed personal journals, weather journals, and letters he exchanged with his (and what would seem to be his only) friend, a Mr. William Shloder.
"In the Realms of the Unreal" describes a world of magical creatures, one populated by free, happy children who are forced to rebel against a nation of monstrous tyrants engaged in child slavery. The text is a panoramic view into the vivid, highly detailed, imaginary world that Henry Darger coexisted in. Accompanying these texts are surreal water-color paintings, hundreds in total, where tracing of children taken out of newspapers and magazines are painted into colorful and bizarre landscapes, showing a sharp contrast between the realistic children and the magical world they existed in.
No-one knew this incredible work existed until shortly before his death, when he was hospitalized with growing ailments, and his landlords debated what to do with his possessions should he die. A journalist recognized the great artistic merit of this enormous work and was able to preserve it.
Though this Henry Darger is often diagnosed (by psychologists, today, looking back on his solitary, eccentric life) as autistic, with Asperger's Syndrome, he has many qualities in common with MY Henry Darger.
In particular, this Henry Darger's magnus opus, a gigantic 15,000 page epic, was inspired by his loss of newspaper clipping of a little girl. This loss was symbolized in his tale as the murder of that girl, a murder that would spark a violent war between children and monsters. These fifteen volumes, which would take him ten years to write, all sprang from the theft (alleged) of this simple newsprint photograph.
My Henry Darger lost something, too. And that's how he found me.
