Darger Timeline

His mother, Rosa Darger (née Fullman, 1862–1896), dies giving birth to his sister, who is put up for adoption.

As a boy, Darger seems to have a good relationship with his father (Henry Joseph Darger, Sr., 1840–1908), a tailor, but he frequently gets into trouble by playing with and setting fires and hurting other children. He mentions throwing ashes into the eyes of a playmate, Francis Gillow, and being punished by his father.

He attends St. Patrick Catholic School. Darger maintains that, because his father taught him to read, he was promoted from the first to the third grade. It is not known at what age or year he started school, but, if he was seven years old, the year would have been 1899. 

His father is admitted to St. Augustine’s Poor House for lameness. 

His godmother presides over his Catholic baptism. 

Eight-year-old Darger is placed in the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, where he acquires the nickname ​“Crazy.”

Darger attends Skinner Elementary School. He discusses Civil War battle losses with his teacher, Mrs. Dewey. John Manley sits across from him at school, and Darger finds him problematic. Manley’s name is later used as one of the most nefarious leaders of the evil forces in his epic novel, In the Realms of the Unreal. 

Darger reports slashing his teacher’s face and arm with a knife. 

Darger is expelled from school, he attests, for disrupting classes by making ​“strange noises” with his mouth. Shortly thereafter, he returns to school.

Twelve-year-old Darger is sent to the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Ill., because of, as noted on the Application for Admission, ​“self-abuse” (a frequent euphemism for masturbation). He is bullied by a young man named Johnnie Johnson, and Darger claims in his autobiography to have beat up Johnson. Other young residents at the asylum—Jacob and Paul Marcus, Donald Aurand, and, especially, Daniel Jones—become his friends. He is attracted to a girl named Jennie Turner, likely inspiration for the character Jennie Turmer in In the Realms of the Unreal. 

Scandals erupt at the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children during Darger’s time there, subsequently prompting major reforms of institutions nationally.

His father dies. 

Darger runs away from the asylum, is caught by a ​“cowboy,” he writes, and is brought back tied up in a rope and pulled by a horse. He runs away a second time but gives himself up to the police. He is sent to a poorhouse in Dunning, Ill., for a month before being returned to the asylum.

Seventeen-year-old Darger runs away a third time and receives room and board, along with two other runaway boys, while working at a farm near Decatur, Ill., which is owned by a German immigrant.

After a brief time, he walks from Decatur back to Chicago. He initially stays with his godmother and receives his first Holy Communion. He is hired as a janitor at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he rooms from 1909–1922.

Sometime within the next several years, Darger befriends an immigrant from Luxembourg named William Schloeder, and they become lifelong friends.

He utilizes numerous planning journals to draft episodes of his In the Realms of the Unreal novel in longhand. (The following list of journals was excerpted from The Writings of Henry J. Darger: A Catalogue Raisonne and Reader’s Guide prepared by John MacGregor and Betsey Farber for the American Folk Art Museum [2001]).

• Battle of Eva Sainte Claire, a small handwritten ​“Compositions” notebook, which is broken in half. To judge by the beautiful penmanship in this journal, it is most likely a very early draft, written before Darger’s handwriting became less elegant.
• Please Return this Book to its Proper Place. This means you Henry D., a several-hundred-page planning journal with a broken binding
• Time Book Monthly, a small bound book containing handwritten ​“Predictions” used in In the Realms of the Unreal
• Two unbound books, two cloth-covered notebooks and two ring-binder sets, totaling more than 1,800 pages of handwritten manuscript material
• No. One, a bound notebook with a 46-page fragment of handwritten material
• Property of Henry Jos. Dargarius (Hendro), a notebook containing handwritten lists of Darger’s favorite songs and Abbieannian song titles, plus copied religious texts
• A very large, heavy bound 474-page notebook containing handwritten material later typed into In the Realms of the Unreal and Further Adventures in Chicago

He begins writing 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 (referred to as In the Realms of the Unreal) in longhand. Some of his early drafts were lost, but other examples can be found within numerous planning journal books.

He loses his coveted Chicago Daily News newspaper photo of Elsie Paroubek, a missing child, dated May 9, 1911, who is thought to be his planned artistic model for the child-martyr character named Annie Aronburg in In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger suspects his roommate, Thomas Phelan, of stealing or destroying the photograph as well as some early handwritten drafts of the novel. He later names the character who assassinates Annie Aronburg ​“Thomas Phelan Tammerline” (other times identified as ​“Phellania Tammerline”) in the novel.

He starts typing In the Realms of the Unreal (1912, according to a fragment from Darger’s writing journal; John M. MacGregor cites 1916 as the start date of typing).

Simultaneous with or, perhaps, within several years of commencing to write his magnum opus, Darger explores different ways to visually depict the characters in the novel. These are often hung on the walls of his boarding house room. His first experiments involve cutting out and overpainting photographs or illustrations from various publications and mounting them on cardboard. Although it is difficult to accurately date much of Darger’s early artwork from before 1930, the very first known depiction of the Vivian Girls dates from this period: an untitled collage of eight separate portraits composed of overpainted found photographs and book or magazine illustrations with descriptive typewritten captions mounted on cardboard. It is possible that, during this period, he made some of his earliest maps of the Realms and a number of pencil, watercolor or crayon battles scenes and landscapes that were copied or executed freehand.

Darger is drafted into the U.S. Army and is transferred to Camp Logan, Texas.

Darger is discharged for eye trouble.

He returns to work and live at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

He quits his job at St. Joseph’s because of an autocratic nun, Sister DePaul.

Darger is hired as a dishwasher at Grant Hospital. He moves into his first apartment, owned by Emil and Minnie Anschütz, at 1035 W. Webster Ave.

Sometime in the late 1920s, Darger makes a number of smaller photographic collages containing a vast population of World War I soldiers, which he further transforms with tempera paint into battle scenes from In the Realms of the Unreal. These works lead to the creation of his monumental collage mural, The Battle of Calverhine, which measures 116 x 37–7/16 in. and occupies nearly an entire wall in his apartment. During this period, he produces another body of work portraying military figures by tracing photographs from various publications and modifying aspects such as facial hair and uniforms with tempera paint, then mounting two or more of them as separate elements on cardboard. In addition, and most important, Darger may have created his first group depiction of the Vivian princesses at this time. Like The Battle of Calverhine, The Vivian Princesses is an early extended-length work that incorporated collage elements. However, the latter, according to MacGregor, may have incorporated his first experiments in tracing images with carbon paper. (A documentary photograph by David Berglund of The Vivian Princesses hanging on a wall in Darger’s boarding house room can be seen in Yukiko Koide and Kyoishe Tsuzuke’s book, Henry Darger’s Room 851 Webster, Imperial Press, Tokyo, 2008, p. 021.)

He creates his first single-sheet and multiple-sheet pieced paper and carbon-traced watercolor works. The earliest of these include flags (long dimensions of 8–24 in.), individual figure and group portraits of girl scouts (most measuring 8 x 12 in.), and depictions of Blengin creatures (long dimensions of 17–36 in.). Perhaps following the success of these pieces, Darger begins composing single- (largely 18 x 24 and 24 x 36 in. sizes) and multiple-sheet narrative scenes that sometimes illustrate—but mainly improvise upon—episodes in In the Realms of the Unreal.

He relocates to an apartment at 851 W. Webster Ave., owned by Police Captain Walter Gehr.

He binds by hand the first seven volumes of In the Realms of the Unreal.

He is let go by his employer at Grant Hospital and returns to St. Joseph’s Hospital as a dishwasher.

Darger finishes typing his saga (about 15,000 pages) but does not bind the remaining pages.

Between 1939 and 1946, Darger writes in longhand Further Adventures in Chicago (some 10,500 pages), reprising characters such as the Vivian sisters and Penrod from In the Realms of the Unreal.

Darger creates No. Two, a second fragment (see No. One above) with 93 pages of handwritten material possibly intended for Further Adventures in Chicago— as well as two additional manuscript fragments for Further Adventures.

Darger expands the size of his artworks to increasingly panoramic lengths. This may have been initially achieved by recycling older single-sheet narrative scenes by joining them together to create diptychs, triptychs, and, sometimes, four- or five-paneled scenes on the recto side, then turning them over and creating one extensive horizontal or vertical composition (with long dimensions of 46–77 in.) on the verso. During the 1940s, the artist introduces nudity that sometimes featured intersexuality into his narrative scenes, and he continues the practice into the 1950s. When clothed, the children no longer dress in the yellow-and-purple uniforms they wore in the 1930s but display the contemporary children’s fashions of the 1940s.

He discovers a drugstore service that photographically enlarges images that he can trace into the fore- and middle-ground areas of his watercolor compositions in order to more effectively create depth-of-field perspective.

In his later autobiography, The History of My Life, Darger describes experiencing a ​“mean streak” because of unanswered prayers pleading to God for the return of the missing Paroubek photo. He also blames God for being discouraged from adopting a child. He stops going to Catholic Mass for a certain period between 1944 and 1947, while working at St. Joseph’s and Alexian Brothers Hospitals. Then, fearing he might suffer eternal damnation, he returns to the faith with renewed zeal, often attending multiple masses daily.

William Schloeder relocates to San Antonio, Texas, with his sister Katharine. Darger sends him letters that are answered by ​“Whillie” through Katherine, as Darger asserted that William could not write in English. (Jim Elledge disputes Darger’s contention, stating in his historical novel Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy, The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist, The Overlook Press, 2013, that Schloeder was born and educated in Chicago and, thus, could read and write.)

Darger is let go from St. Joseph’s Hospital, because the janitorial work becomes too difficult.

Darger is hired at Alexian Brothers Hospital as a dishwasher, then he is transferred to the bandage room after four years.

He continues to extend the horizontal expanse of his compositions. Some of the lengthiest works (long dimensions of 69–116 in.) in this decade were composed of six approximately 24 x 19 in. sheets of paper. In the 1950s, Darger begins to blacken in the eyes of many figures with heavily worked graphite, possibly to give them a shining, lifelike quality, when they caught the light.

The last two decades of Darger’s life saw the gradual diminishment and ultimate disappearance of any references to the In the Realms of the Unreal novel or the rebellion of child slaves against the Glandelinians. While nudity and intersexuality are still present, they are overshadowed by an increasing number of girls wearing colorful pinafore dresses.

He writes six weather journals from daily observations.

Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner become Darger’s new landlords at the apartment building at 851 W. Webster Ave. William Schloeder, still living in Texas, contracts the Asian flu and dies. Darger takes the news of his only friend’s death very hard.

He fabricates the most monumental compositions of his career, joining together as many as seven sheets (long dimensions of 105–132 in.). As the 1960s unfold, most narrative references to his epic novel disappear; Glandelinian violence is now a thing of the past as Darger prepares to put it all behind him. His last works picture increasing multitudes of random children posed side-by-side within indoor and outdoor settings.

Leg pain forces Darger to retire.

He begins writing The History of My Life (approximately 5,000 pages). The first 200 pages reflect Darger’s life, but the remaining 4,800 pages obsess over a fictional tornado called ​“Sweetie Pie” and the damage it does.

He writes thousands of loose manuscript pages in longhand that seem to be associated with The History of My Life.

Darger keeps a diary of day-to-day activities in two volumes.

He is struck by a car and suffers from injuries to his left leg and hip.

He is admitted to St. Augustine’s Home for the Aged on December 1.

Nathan Lerner asks David Berglund to clean out Darger’s room. After several truckloads of detritus are hauled away, Berglund and Lerner discover Darger’s artworks and writings.

Darger dies on April 13, one day after his 81st birthday, and is buried in a pauper’s grave at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Ill. (Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner later purchase a more fitting gravestone and hold a ceremony to commemorate the new stone in 1996.)