Connor: Had you already written the unicorn’s capture by Mommy Fortuna before you decided to use Schmendrick?

Peter: Yes.

Connor: So the sequence at the end of chapter one, when Mommy Fortuna and Schmendrick and Rukh come upon the sleeping unicorn together, that’s not how you originally wrote that?

Peter: No, I went back and put Schmendrick into that. By the way, the name of the wizard that Schmendrick was apprenticed to, Nikos? That’s another private reference. At the time I was reading a lot of books by a Greek author named Nikos Kazantzakis, and I know the name of Schmendrick’s master comes right out of my fascination with the man’s work. He was remarkably skillful, so it was appropriate to give his name to a master magician. I still like Kazantzakis a lot. He wrote Zorba the Greek and Freedom or Death and The Last Temptation of Christ, and an incredible sequel to The Odyssey‌—‌you have to be Greek to write something like that.

Connor: The next significant batch of characters you introduce in the book are the outlaws of the Greenwood‌—‌Captain Cully, Jack Jingly, Willie Gentle, and of course Captain Cully’s kind-of girlfriend, Molly Grue.

Peter: Part of that was certainly a parody of Robin Hood, but there was more to it. This was the time of the American folk music boom. There were a lot of 18 year-old Jewish kids heading off into the Appalachian Mountains, lugging big tape recorders with them, to hunt down variant versions of this or that 16th-century Scots-Irish ballad. Everybody was being Alan Lomax. I was very aware of that. I can remember hearing somebody trying to describe a particular singer, saying, with real earnestness, “He’s so pure that he’s almost authentic.” That stayed with me, and I was thinking of it when I had Captain Cully insist that Willie Gentle sing one of the many songs Cully has written about himself, pointing out that “You’ll need the practice one day when you’re field-recorded.” Pure anachronism, and directly from that early-to-mid-’60s Berkeley/Greenwich Village folk music period.

Connor: If we’re talking anachronisms, the biggest one in the book is in this very same sequence.

Peter: Ah, yes. “Have a taco.” That’s the one line people remember from The Last Unicorn when they don’t remember anything else, because it comes so much out of left field. That’s a 5:30 line.

Connor: Excuse me?

Peter: I’m a creature of habit. Back then I had an office cat who would literally herd me down to my office in the barn, harassing me until I got to work. Around 5:30 each day the cat would indicate that it might be all right to go up to the house for dinner. I was usually pretty tired by then anyway, because that damn animal always had me starting early, so I’d stop writing for the day. But every now and then one of those 5:30 lines, or images, or passages would come in, and I’d write whatever it was down and say “Okay, if I still like it tomorrow, it stays in.” The “have a taco” line was the last of a particular day’s work, and it cracked me up. But I thought “You’re not reliable. You’re hungry and eager to leave. Check it in the morning.” Well, when I looked at it the morning it still made me laugh, so it stayed in.