He was the consummate outsider artist, entirely unknown in his lifetime. But since his death in 1973 at age 81, Henry Darger has become one of the hottest names in the art world. His horrifyingly beautiful double-sided murals, masterfully made with children’s watercolor paints, are a mythic narrative, an action adventure of epic proportions blending the fantastical, fictional, and historical with images of this world and someplace entirely other. Military men, hermaphroditic girls, and winged serpents are locked in a wholly original, violent, gender-bending battle of good against evil. Born in 1892, Darger had a childhood that reads like the grimmest of fairy tales. He ran away from the notorious Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children at 16, got a janitorial job in a hospital, and set about making his life’s work—which includes the paintings and the world’s longest novel, 15,145 pages long: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. A comprehensive exhibition of Daiger’s paintings and manuscripts in New York this month inaugurates the American Folk Art Museum’s new building, designed by architects Tod Williams Billie Tsien and Associates. A companion volume is being published by Abrams. Reclusive, obsessive, vigilantly religious, Darger created work that has inspired poets, fashion designers, and rock bands. The world of Henry Darger is like an archaeological find, a mesmerizing illustration of the imagination unbound, frightening in its toxic purity.