BP Editors
Henry Darger was a typical urban hermit: he worked as a janitor, he lived in a small apartment in Chicago for close to 40 years, never married, and kept to himself. After he died, however, in 1973, his former landlords discovered that Darger was a typical hermit with an atypical habit: he had been writing and illustrating a novel for years, and the tome was more than 15,000 pages long by the time he died.
Bearing the unwieldy title of 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, this epic fantasy was richly illustrated by accompanying watercolors. Girls with wings fly above the strange pastel landscapes, pursued by men with swords and bayonets. The book is rich and disturbing, a supreme example of outsider art.
