logo
Welcome, guest! ~ Login ~ Register 

Quick Search:

S9.com / Biographies /

Darger, Henry

Portrait
Born: 1892 AD
Died: 1973 AD, at 81 years of age.

Nationality: American
Categories: Artists, Authors

Edit


1892 – He was a reclusive American writer and artist born this year in Chicago, Illinois. While he is believed to have been born on the 12th day of April, the exact date is debated.

 

1896 - When he was four years old, his mother, Rose (née Fullman), died after having given birth to a daughter who was given up for adoption; he never knew his sister.

 

1900 - Darger's own report, his father, Henry Sr., was kind to him, and they lived together until this year. In that year the crippled and impoverished Darger Sr. had to be taken to live at St. Augustine's Catholic Mission home and his son was placed in a Catholic boys' home. Darger Sr. died in 1905

 

1913 – He witnessed the complete destruction of the town of Countrybrown, Illinois, by a huge tornado.

 

1930 - Darger 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.

 

1939 - The sequel to In the Realms of the Unreal is titled Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago. Begun in this year, it is a Stephen King-like tale of a house that is possessed by demons and haunted by ghosts, or perhaps has an evil consciousness of its own, like the hotel in The Shining.

 

1968 – He became interested in tracing some of his frustrations back to his childhood. It was in this year that he wrote The History of My Life, a book that spends 206 pages detailing his early life before veering off into 4,672 pages of fiction about a huge twister called Sweetie Pie, probably based on Darger's traumatic experience at Countrybrown.

 

1973 – He died on the 13th day of April this year in Chicago, Illinois.

 

 

 






Edit

Page last updated: 11:26am, 29th Jun '07

Related Books

Sound and Fury: The Art of Henry Darger
by Edward Gomez and Henry Darger (Paperback - Jul 1, 2008)
Published in 2008, this is the second edition of the 9 x 13 inch catalogue published on the occasion of solo exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris, 2006. Text both in English and French...
Usually ships in 24 hours
Henry Darger: Disasters Of War
by Henry Darger (Paperback - Apr 2, 2004)
Henry Darger spent his life working as a janitor in Catholic hospitals, living alone in a rented room on Chicago's north side, attending Mass up to five times a day, and writing a picaresque tale in...

Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings
by Henry Darger and Michael Bonesteel (Hardcover - Dec 25, 2000)
The voluminous works of Henry Darger were discovered after his death in 1973 by his landlord in a crowded and almost derelict apartment on Chicago's Northside. Among the piles of newspapers,...

Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum
by Brooke Davis Anderson and Michel Thevoz (Hardcover - Dec 1, 2001)
Sweetly colored, pleasingly composed, and delicately rendered, Henry Darger's scroll-like paintings of armies of transsexual children have had a cult status since they were first shown in 1997 at the...

Henry Darger's Room
by Henry) Kiyoko Lerner, Nathan Lerner, David Berglund, photographs (Darger (Hardcover - Jul 25, 2008)
Girls on the Run: A Poem
by John Ashbery (Hardcover - Apr 25, 1999)
A book-length poem that is at once tragic and hilarious.Girls on the Run is a poem loosely based on the works of the "outsider" artist Henry Darger (1892-1972), a recluse who toiled for decades at an...


More Books