Henry Darger | MoMA

“I figure that it’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.” Henry Darger In 1972, the retired custodian Henry Darger left his rented room in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago to move to a nursing home. The room had been his home for over four decades, and in it he left behind a trove that astonished his landlord: it included a six-volume weather journal, a 5,000-page autobiography, a 15,000-page novel, and several hundred drawings, paintings, and collages. Darger, his biographers believe, had never shown these works to anyone. The most ambitious of Darger’s literary and artistic endeavors was his illustrated epic about an imaginary world of rival nations divided over the practice of child enslavement and exploitation, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. In this sprawling tale of good and evil, the heroi

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