Printed in 2012, this revelatory monograph provides a redemptive, compassionate portrait of Henry Darger, an obsessive creator as usually pathologized as he’s mythologized. Drawing on queer research and literary archives, cultural historian Michael Moon situates Darger’s visionary tales starring the Vivian Women—whose pastoral idylls are continually interrupted by horrific sexual predation—in relation to the efflorescence of working-class print tradition within the interwar years. As Moon brilliantly exhibits, Darger’s fictional narratives, conceived as allegories of slavery, had been vested in youngsters’s books, biblical tracts, comics, pulp fiction, and American historical past.
