Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. Losing his parents at an early age, he grew up in orphanages and foster care. During childhood he suffered physical and emotional abuse, among others in the mental institution in which he was placed. At 16 he began working as a janitor in Chicago hospitals, a position he held for 48 years, until his retirement in 1963. In the 1920s he began painting and writing a magnum opus whose cryptic long title was 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.

- The discovery -
Nathan Lerner, a photographer, artist and university art lecturer, discovered Darger's paintings following the latter's hospitalization in 1972. When he entered the one-room apartment he had rented out to Darger for more than 40 years, he found over 15,000 painted and written pages which comprise In the Realms of the Unreal inside two large boxes.

- The work -
Darger created a private mythology centered on the story of the seven Vivian sisters who face repeated threats posed by seven Glandelinian men. The protagonists of Darger's epic, which was painted in watercolor, pencil, and pen, are depicted as sweet girls, sometimes wearing dresses, sometimes naked, with male sex organs. The paintings juxtapose pastoral scenes with depictions of cruel abuse. What appears at f irst sight as an illustration for fairy tales, is gradually revealed to be a dark, disconcerting world ref lecting latent anxieties, impulses, and desires.