Born in Chicago in 1892, Henry Darger lived an impoverished life. When he was four, his mother died after giving birth to a girl who was given up for adoption. The infant’s history remains unknown. After a stint in a Catholic boys’ home, twelve-year-old Henry was placed in the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. The reasons: a propensity for aggressive behavior toward other children; setting fires; “acquired” self-abuse. He ran away from the asylum several times and escaped for good in 1909, walking to Chicago, where he found work as a janitor at a Catholic hospital. He spent the rest of his life as a menial laborer and seems to have had only one true friend, Willhie Schloeder, with whom he visited Riverview Amusement Park.

Darger was obsessed with the 1911 abduction and murder of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Czech girl. The loss of a treasured newspaper photograph of Elsie threw him into the tumult of grief and rage that, in part, inspired his magnum opus. In 1932 he moved to 851 Webster Avenue, occupying a single large room until poor health necessitated his move to a Catholic nursing home when he was eighty.

In 1956, the Webster Avenue building was bought by the noted Chicago photographer Nathan Lerner. An extraordinarily compassionate landlord, Lerner never raised Darger’s rent. Along with other residents of the building, he provided occasional meals and, as Darger grew increasingly frail, help with medical care. Darger, a furtive, slight man, just over five feet tall, always wore the filthy ruins of his army overcoat and spent hours poking through trash cans for refuse, which he then brought back to his apartment. His neighbors often heard Henry talking to himself, carrying on lengthy conversations in which he took on different voices. He was in fact engaged in the final stages of a lifelong battle with God.

Not long before Darger died in 1972, Lerner entered his room to clean it. There he found (among other works) fifteen volumes, totaling more than fifteen thousand pages, and hundreds of pictures illustrating a vast epic, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.