Modeled upon the books he loved as a child—L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi stories, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod series—Darger’s epic follows the Vivian Girls through an endless relay of scrapes, plots, imprisonments, battles, tortures, escapes, and cataclysmic storms. Yet, as Darger himself admits, “This is not the land where Dorothy and her Oz friends reside.” Art critics make much of Darger’s luminous use of color and his genius for collage, and many of the paintings in the Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum are breathtakingly gorgeous. But this is not Oz. The Realms is as excruciating and detailed a portrait of the human psyche as we have seen: brutal, banal, transcendental, with flashes of the divine. The timeless urge to create is what made the profoundly damaged, isolated, and lonely man named Henry Darger human. It is also what may make him immortal.

Selected Bibliography

Whenever possible, I relied on primary sources, including myriad period books, magazines, and newspaper articles in archives, online, and elsewhere. This is a very select list of the books I found most useful over nearly ten years of researching this novel.

1. Henry Darger

Anderson, Brooke Davis, editor. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Biesenbach, Klaus, editor. Henry Darger: Disasters of War. Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2000.

———. Henry Darger. Berlin: Prestel Verlag, in cooperation with the American Folk Art Museum, New York, 2014.

Darger, Henry. Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Bonesteel. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.

———. Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001.

———. Henry Darger’s Room: 851 Webster. Introduction by John M. MacGregor. Tokyo: Imperial Press, 2007.

Elledge, Jim. Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2013.

MacGregor, John M. The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

———. Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. Lugano, Switzerland: Fondazione Galleria Gottardo, 1996.

Yu, Jessica, dir. In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. DVD, 2004.

2. Early Film

Ankerich, Michael G. Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1993.

Brown, Karl. Adventures with D. W. Griffith. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

Corcoran, Michael, and Arnie Bernstein. Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100+ Years of Chicago and the Movies. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013.

Griffith, Mrs. D. W. [Linda Arvidson]. When the Movies Were Young. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1925.

Kiehn, David. Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company. Berkeley, CA: Farwell Books, 2003.

Nickelodeon: The Director’s Cut. Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich. Columbia Pictures, DVD, 2009.

Smith, Michael Golver, and Adam Selzer. Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry. New York: Wallflower Press, 2015.

Swanson, Gloria. Swanson on Swanson: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1980.

3. Riverview Park and Chicago