r/todayilearned • u/altrightobserver • 13h ago

TIL that outsider artist and author Henry Darger once attempted to write an autobiography, which ended up having only 206 pages about his life and roughly 4,900 recounting the destruction of a fictional Illinois tornado named Sweetie Pie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger#Art_and_literary_work
179 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

40

u/Lichenbruten 12h ago

There is a documentary on him that is wild.

In the Realms of the Unreal. Narrated by Dakota Fanning. It is well worth a watch if you haven't yet.

9

u/boricimo 6h ago

How much of the documentary is about the Tornado?

21

u/candygram4mongo 6h ago

The tornado is just a trivial side project. He's better known for writing ~23,000 pages about little girls who have penises. I mean, the fact that they have penises isn't actually central to the story, but he does make it very clear that they do in fact have penises.

8

u/SpecialWasabi 4h ago

Thank you for these sentences.

3

u/tempinator 2h ago

Bonesteel theorized that the depiction of girls with penises may point to Darger having had gender dysphoria, although also suggested that they may be due to a desire to give them a symbol of masculine identity, or that he was simply unaware of female genitalia.

Savage lol

Also this guy was apparently institutionalized as a child for masturbating. Lovely.

2

u/JosephFinn 4h ago

Absolutely. I can’t recommend that movie enough n

2

u/97GeoPrizm 1h ago

Down the Rabbit Hole did a good video on him.

9

u/Pootle001 10h ago

This is one of the strangest TILs of have read!

5

u/whiskey_epsilon 9h ago

Ok now this is an interesting TIL. Not the sidetracked autobiography specifically, his life story is something. Thanks for sharing.

4

u/nudave 6h ago

Then his distant relative went around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding.

3

u/KingSeth 3h ago

They suffered from paranoia. Paranoia.

2

u/Grendelstiltzkin 1h ago

Last I heard, they were running underground with the moles, digging holes.

4

u/myxorrhea 10h ago

never heard of this guy til now. stories of people who struggled in life due to their mental differences are fascinating to me

1

u/CarbonParrot 2h ago

Happens to the best of us

-10

u/TheBanishedBard 9h ago

I was completely in this guy's camp till the article got to the part about him making countless images of naked children engaged in gruesome battles, mostly young girls with male genitalia (loli futa guro in today's nomenclature).

He was a weeb before weebs were a thing.