His dress was shabby; he was a solitary. In 1930 he settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's north side. It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death in 1973, that Darger's extraordinary secret life was discovered.
Amid a thick accumulation of debris- including hundreds of Pepto-Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string, old newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious kitsch and much more- his landlord, the photographer Nathan Lerner, found a creative life's work: an enormous literary and pictorial production. The key element was a picaresque tale in 12 massive volumes composed of some 19,000 pages of legal-sized paper filled with single-spaced typing entitled
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. The origins of this epic appear to be in 1909. It took more than eleven years to write it in longhand; in 1912 Darger began the task of typing the still incomplete manuscript...
the most important supplement to the book, however, exists in the several hundred watercolor paintings Darger left in his room, many of them illustrations for
The Realms of the Unreal. They transform Darger’s apocalyptic text into a body of images that are among the most original and beautiful in outsider art.
http://www.hammergallery.com/artists/darger/darger.htm