Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"'Henry Darger' is an improbable, wrist-wrecking page turner, and John MacGregor is, in a profound sense, a mystery writer." -- Village Voice, April 23, 2002

"A book that is part academic magnum opus and part mystery thriller." -- San Jose Mercury News, June 9, 2002

"It is a masterpiece. Empathetic and sophisticated." -- Dr. Leo Navratil, July 2, 2002

"MacGregor's book is tremendously rewarding for its many excellent color reproductions and its always fascinating, sometimes brilliant insights." -- Art on Paper, May-June 2002

"One is in deep waters here, where precedents--William Blake? Lewis Carrol? Balthus?--are remote and few." -- The New Yorker, January 14, 2002

"This is the best book we will ever have on the most important artist we almost never had." -- The Village Voice, December 11, 2002

Product Description

Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal is a generously illustrated book that represents the culmination of more than a decade of research into the enigmatic artist's life and work by world renowned outsider art expert John MacGregor. The long awaited monograph is MacGregor’s first English-language publication on Henry Darger and the most comprehensive critical investigation of Darger’s writings and illustrations available in any language.

Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. Shortly before his death in 1973, his landlord, Chicago artist Nathan Lerner, made a startling discovery in his tenant’s room: the history of another world in fifteen volumes, In the Realms of the Unreal—at 15,145 type-written pages, possibly the longest work of fiction ever written. In startlingly vivid detail, Darger’s Realms recounted the role of seven sisters, known as the Vivian Girls, in a violent conflict over child enslavement on an unnamed planet. Amidst the refuse, Lerner also found three huge bound volumes of brightly colored illustrations for the work, many painted on both sides and some over twelve feet in length. In the decades since his death, Darger’s alternate universe has attracted the intense interest of collectors, critics, and scholars around the world. His illustrations and writings have been the subject of major museum exhibitions in Europe and North America.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Delano Greenidge Editions; illustrated edition edition (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0929445155
• ISBN-13: 978-0929445151
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.3 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,465,448 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on Darger there is, April 25, 2002

By	Michael Leddy (Charleston, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just finished a first trek through this remarkable book. What especially strikes me is the way John MacGregor's writing captures the process of thinking through the enigma of Henry Darger's life and work. Reading the book is like watching a great detective at work--MacGregor writes not as though he's already come to conclusions but as though he's coming to them in the act of writing. And he manages to do so while organizing everything in a number of ways--around Darger's life history, his artistic and technical development, and the increasingly violence depcited in his work. Throughout the book MacGregor makes Henry Darger real--as a deeply damaged child and adult, as a tormented believer in God, as a person of enormous inner resources, and as a creative genius. His ways of accounting for Darger's peculiar obsessions (suffocstion, evisceration, male genitals on girls) are pwerfully persuasive, and draw upon considerable research into the circumstances of Darger's childhood and the nightmarish conditions at the "asylum" in Illinois where Darger spent much of his youuth.

I've read MacGregor's earlier book in French, Michael Bonesteel's book, and the American Folk Art Museum book, but this book taught me more about Darger than I could've imagined. If you're new to Darger, it's the book to begin with. If you're already familiar with Darger's work, this is the book you've been waiting for.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darger: Brilliant, scary enigma, May 3, 2002

By	David Lupton (Norristown, PA United States) - See all my reviews

Darger's voluminous work, of which the drawings are only the tip of the iceberg, are inaccessable, literally, except for fragments published in a previous collection. Even if the full opus was available it would still be a alien monument due to it's sheer size, attracting only the peculiarly curious and those who have aquired the taste for Darger's vision. This said, MacGregor's work is a valuable description by a voyager to a dark continent who is capable of expressing the awe, fear and wonder that he experienced when immersed in this strange land. The book is lush, in design and writing, and each chapter tackles a different aspect of the Darger mystery. I imagine attempting to read all of Darger would cause the odd combination of shock and boredom that de Sade's work elicits, trangressive scenes compulsively written ad nausiam. MacGregor distills the major themes of Henry's work, avoids the mind-numbing repetition, yet preserves the vertigo of scale that Darger achieved, intentionally or otherwise. An odd masterpeice written about an even odder masterpeice.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joseoh C. Tedeschi, January 13, 2003

By	Joseph C. Tedeschi (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews

For anyone looking to enter the unreal realms of Henry Darger, his writings and his artwork, MacGregor's book is essential. He has both exhaustively researched and reconstructed Darger's life as an isolated, perhaps mentally disturbed individual working as a dishwasher and janitor in Chicago and delved deeply into the often gruesome content of Darger's fantasy realm. The book itself is a wonder - it is like a great independent film, unflinching, provocative, well-constructed.