Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings Hardcover – December 1, 2000

I don't normally leave reviews for books because most of my purchases are straightforward and uneventful. But in this case this was a $107 book and you'd think that would at least warrant a padded, bubble envelope. No. This book was sent to me in a regular plastic sleeve, unprotected and embarrassingly exposed. Luckily, it wasn't damaged too badly and, for the price of a hard to find title, I'll be keeping it. But I'll definitely be very wary about ordering from them again. They got lucky, very lucky the mail carriers didn't drop it.

I've waited for a collection of Darger's work ever since I first saw a handful of originals on exhibit at the County Museum. This volume has a lot (over 100?) of high quality color reproductions of the Vivian Girls leading the sometimes bloody, cosmic child slavery rebellion against the invading Glandelinians, along with source material, and some interesting shots of Darger's studio/apartment.There are also some pretty interesting writing excerpts from Darger's mammoth source material, REALMS OF THE UNREAL (which dwarfs the notebook writing of David Fincher's antagonists in SEVEN and FIGHT CLUB). It's pretty genuine, and the editors contend to've kept the editing to a crucial minimum.Tim Burton, et al., can claim to be as weird or on the fringe as much as they want, but they don't hold a candle to someone with a real chemical imbalance.It's pricey, but well worth it if you're a collector of this sort of stuff. Now, if only someone would make a comparable collection for Adolfo Wolfi...

This book is very detailed with a lot of writing and the most comprehensive collection of this artists work that I have seen. If you are interested in this artist, this is the book I would recommend

I like his art. Some people think he's a pedophile and I get why. His stuff is pretty out there. If you like out there stuff and don't mind seeing images of strangled and eviscerated children this book might be for you.

Henry Darger (1892-1973) spent most of his life working as a dishwasher, janitor, and bandage roller at a hospital in Chicago. Darger's mother died in childbirth with his sister when Darger was 3 years old, and his father died when Darger was 15. The family was economically destitute, and the young Darger ended up in boys homes, orphanages, and such unsavory institutions as the "Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children" in Lincoln, Illinois. Darger lived most of his adult life in the same apartment, and when he died in 1973 his landlord found a number of homemade books containing three large manuscripts written and illustrated by Darger, each more than 5000 pages long. The most important manuscript is the first, a 14 volume work titled "The Realms of the Unreal, or the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion," which Darger spent two decades writing and illustrating. This epic is the chronicled history of a 4-year war on an imaginary world. On this world, children have been enslaved and a war breaks out to free them. Spearheading the rebellion are the seven Vivian sisters, little girl heroes--figures which seem to have been based, at least partly, on Joan of Arc. Among the story's other main influences are Frank L. Baum's Oz books, the works of Charles Dickens, and the history of the American Civil War. Darger's artwork is both imaginatively vivid and disturbing. Most of the art involves little girls as the heroes and the victims, with men and supernatural creatures called "the Blegiglomenean Serpents" (or, "the Blengins") as their oppressors. The little girls are often depicted in idyllic portraits; however, they are also often shown being strangled or killed in battle. Also, they are often nude, and sometimes portrayed as hermaphrodites with male genitals. Much of Darger's work is composed of individual figures traced from magazines or comics. Artistically, Darger is compared with figures as diverse as Blake and Andy Warhol.

Henry Darger, the janitor who spent a lifetime writing and illustrating a loving paedophile epic of staggering proportions never seen until his death, has not yet found his time but it will come. His frenzied Blake-like illustrations have had some exposure in museums which feature outsider and folk art (like the recent exhibit at P.S.1 in NYC) but this collection of his work exhibits a glimpse of the novel they were designed to support. With no training his obsessive masterpiece includes prose, poetry, songs and maps. Infectious in a raw undeniable way it is a spelendid, brilliant, disturbing and awesome.