Henry Joseph Darger was born in Chicago on April 12, 1892. Four years later his mother died during childbirth. When his father became unable to care for him, Henry went first to a boys' home and later to the Lincoln Asylum in downstate Illinois. After his father's death, he ran away to Chicago where he lived the rest of his life, working as a janitor, dishwasher, and bandage roller in three local hospitals. By night he wrote his great unfinished (and still unpublished) novel, In the Realms of the Unreal, and later created the artworks for which he is best known. He died in 1973.