“Too late now,” said Henry Darger, an 80something retired janitor and former central Illinois resident, as he waited for death at a Chicago charitable institution in 1973. He’d just been told that his landlords discovered the artworks he’d created over a lifetime. But Darger thought it was too late for his art and too late for him. Once again, he was out of touch.

Darger’s was a life in reverse. It was only after death that his fantasy became real and his name became known. Until then, he was a pathetic figure, a poor hospital janitor who rarely spoke to others, yet talked and even yelled to himself in his tiny room on Chicago’s north side.

After ill health forced him to leave his apartment of 40 years, his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, found it crammed to the ceiling with treasures, according to the Web site of Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery, which represents his work. Amid the multitudes of Pepto Bismol bottles, string, magazine photos of children, and other detritus Darger had collected on city streets, were hundreds of mysterious paintings and associated writings, including a 15,000-plus-page novel: 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.

His alternately sweet and violent paintings illustrate the novel’s story of the “Vivian Girls,” pious innocents from a fictitious Christian country who battle a country that rips children from their parents and enslaves them. In his writing and art Darger created a highly detailed fantasy world which, given the volume of his output, must have consumed much of his life. It was so detailed that this Civil War buff created casualty lists of the battle’s soldiers and designed flags for the numerous warring parties.

After his landlords found Darger’s works,