Darger’s Resources

At night, Henry Darger (18921973) brought extraordinary fictional worlds to life in drawings, paintings, and texts. During the day, he earned a living as a hospital janitor. Challenging the widespread conception of Darger as an eccentric loner, Michael Moon reveals the artist to have been immersed in his world and time. Moon interprets Darger's art as a remarkably expressive, albeit often disturbing, imaginative record of the joys and terrors of the lives of millions of denizens of the twentieth century. The artist engaged with the burgeoning mass culture of the early twentieth century, from popular religious art to children's illustrated books for and newspaper comic strips. Drawing on diverse sources from newspaper accounts of the anniversaries of U.S. Civil War battles to the virgin-martyr theater that was long a staple of parochial-school education, Darger fashioned his own style of narrating and depicting the epic of his adored Vivian Girls and their adult and child allies. Darger is often relegated to the category of "outsider artist." Moon contest that characterization, arguing that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with such contemporaries as the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher, the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, and the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum.

Michael Moon is Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. He is the author of Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. His books A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol; Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (edited with Cathy N. Davidson); and Displacing Homophobia (edited with Ronald R. Butters and John M. Clum) are also published by Duke University Press.