Connor: You finally left in April of 1963, and after reaching California you weren’t writing fiction at all, just nonfiction articles for magazines like Holiday and the Saturday Evening Post, plus the cross-country scooter trip memoir that eventually became your second published book, I See By My Outfit. Why the big change?

Peter: I had an instant family to feed, and no idea how to do that, so thank goodness for Harry Sions at Holiday. He wasn’t the only magazine editor to give me assignments, but he was the first. I was learning how to write to a deadline, to length limitations, and to do it for money. The check I got for the Holiday serialization of I See By My Outfit‌—‌which they published in abridged form as “A Long Way To Go”‌—‌kept us going for nearly a year. Money went a lot farther back then.

Connor: You finally did return to fiction, by once again picking up The Last Unicorn.

Peter: That didn’t happen until several years after I moved to California. Late 1965, I think. It was Enid’s doing. She simply wanted to know the rest of the story. I hadn’t even talked about it in a long time, but I did start talking about it with her, and by and by I got started again. I began by throwing out nearly everything‌—‌all I saved were parts of the first chapter.

Connor: That’s fairly radical.

Peter: It was necessary. The two-headed demon went, along with his coal from Hell. And since I had decided to make the book both a fairy tale and a spoof on fairy tales, the whole idea that the unicorn’s adventure was happening in modern times had to go. Which meant cutting the dragon, since the point of that character had been the comic irony of his unfortunate encounter with the 20th Century. By the time I was done, only seven or eight pages remained from the original 85. The old road hadn’t led anywhere; I had to go back to the start and find a new path…and let me tell you, every memory I have of what came next, with very few exceptions, is painful. It was nothing but struggle. It was Sisyphus pushing that damn rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down again. I worked and worked at it, mostly in a back bedroom, keeping an ear open for the two smaller children, Dan and Kalisa, in case they needed company or had gotten into trouble…and every now and then I’d lay off if a magazine job came along, because that was practical cash and we needed it. People imagine that writing The Last Unicorn was an enchanted voyage, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings, but this was not the case. It took me close to two years, and it was hard every step of the way.

Connor: You told me once that in this second pass you were deliberately emulating other writers.

Peter: Very consciously so. They were all people that Phil and I loved‌—‌James Stephens, T. H. White, Lord Dunsany, the James Thurber of The Thirteen Clocks and The White Deer. We knew these books very nearly by heart, and we’d throw lines from them at each other constantly. We used to play a kind of double solitaire called “Steal the Bundle,” and one of us would snatch up a mess of cards and gloat over them, at which point the other would say “Quiet please, you gleaming thief.” And the usual reply would be another other Thurber standard we used, “We all have our flaws and mine is being wicked.” The problem was that all these writers we loved were dead. We’d already had all of their work that we were ever going to get. So I wanted to write the kind of book that might have existed if all of them were alive now and writing together.