Published in 2012, this revelatory monograph offers a redemptive, compassionate portrait of Henry Darger, an obsessive creator as often pathologized as he is mythologized. Drawing on queer studies and literary archives, cultural historian Michael Moon situates Darger’s visionary tales starring the Vivian Girls—whose pastoral idylls are constantly interrupted by horrific sexual predation—in relation to the efflorescence of working-class print culture in the interwar years. As Moon brilliantly shows, Darger’s fictional narratives, conceived as allegories of slavery, were vested in children’s books, biblical tracts, comics, pulp fiction, and American history.
