paranormale/close up shot with debris and doll_girls

Henry Darger was one of those people hardly anyone notices, who, seemingly, move through life as shadows. Born in 1892, possibly in Brazil or in Germany by his various accounts and perhaps bearing the surname, Dargarius, young Henry lived with his father- "a tailor and a kind and easygoing man" in Chicago until 1900. In that year the elder and crippled Darger had to be taken to live in a Catholic Mission and his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home. Darger Sr. died in 1905 and his son was institutionalized as feeble-minded, apparently on the basis of a doctor's diagnosis that "Little Henry's heart is not in the right place." A series of escapes ended successfully in 1908. The 16-year-old Darger found menial employment in a Catholic hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself for the following 50 years. His life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he attended 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; he was a solitary. In 1930 he 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.

Amid a thick accumulation of debris- including hundreds of Pepto-Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string, old newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious kitsch and much more- his landlord, the photographer Nathan Lerner, found a creative life's work: an enormous literary and pictorial production. The key element was a picaresque tale in 12 massive volumes composed of some 19,000 pages of legal-sized paper filled with single-spaced typing entitled 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. The origins of this epic appear to be in 1909. It took more than eleven years to write it in longhand; in 1912 Darger began the task of typing the still incomplete manuscript.