Connor: Just like that, snap‌—‌no trigger? No moment of inspiration?

Peter: I really can’t say where the image came from. It was just suddenly there. I’d read tons of fantasy and mythology from early childhood on, sure; and when I was a little kid my mother took me along to one of the elementary school classes she was teaching, where according to her I told all her students a story about unicorns. There was also a children’s book by Dorothy Lathrop that I had loved, The Colt from Moon Mountain, which was about a unicorn in Kansas, and when I was 17 I was given a painting of unicorns fighting bulls, done by a Spanish artist named Marcial Rodriguez who was married to my cousin. But I wasn’t conscious of any of those things at the time I got the mental picture I’m telling you about. I was just sitting there in Cheshire, deeply frustrated, and the unicorn came to me. I didn’t know anything about her at all, not who she was, or where she was going, or why, or who was traveling with her. Nothing. I only knew that I desperately needed to be working. So I started. For research I got on my motor scooter and drove over to the Pittsfield Library, where I looked up everything they had on unicorns and mythology. It wasn’t much, and in fact I really didn’t find anything I didn’t already know, except for an entry mentioning that a doctor named Olfert Dapper had seen a wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673. That captivated me‌—‌it didn’t say that he claimed to have seen it, but rather that he did see it, so I took a little note and eventually the good doctor wound up in The Last Unicorn’s dedication.

Connor: You also dedicated the book to Robert Nathan.

Peter: I had discovered Robert’s books when I was in college. I loved his books, and I still think that A Fine and Private Place owes a lot to his novel One More Spring, which had been published before I was born. But I didn’t meet Robert until years after I started in on that first incomplete version of The Last Unicorn.

Connor: The 85 pages you managed to write that summer have now been published in a limited collector’s edition called The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version, from Subterranean Press, and will be coming out again in a collection of backstage items from your career called The First Last Unicorn and Other Beginnings. It’s a startling read. That original version is almost completely different from the book everyone knows.

Peter: Very much so.

Connor: The unicorn is much the same. She’s still seeking all the missing unicorns in the world. There is still a singing butterfly, though his crazy-quilt spiel goes in a different direction. But that’s about all. Everything else is unfamiliar. The story is set in modern times‌—‌there are asphalt roads, and speeding automobiles, and the battered dragon who first tells the unicorn that she is the last or her kind complains of pigheaded policemen and having its tail run over by a truck. There’s no Mommy Fortuna or Midnight Carnival, no Molly Grue, no Red Bull, no Prince Lír or King Haggard. And there’s no Schmendrick. Instead of him, the unicorn’s traveling companion is a two-headed demon from Hell who has been kicked out for being both too traditional (one head) and a complete troublemaker (the other).