Known as a proto-typical Outsider Artist, Henry Darger did works on paper of fantasy subjects in naive style to create a wide range of images evoking childhood on an extremely simplistic level. His first retrospective was held in 1998 and was organized by the Museum of American Folk Art in New York.

He was born in Chicago to a father of German ancestry who worked as a tailor, and a mother, originally from Wisconsin, who died of infection at the age of thirty-five with another child when Henry was four years old. He lived with his father for awhile and then at age eight, was sent to a Catholic boys home while attending public school. His behavior was odd; he grew to only five-feet three inches; and he made such disrupt...