Connor: After you completed your second draft and polish, and sent The Last Unicorn off to your agent, did you have any worries about how it would be received? After all, Viking had passed on your previous novel, which had certainly been more obviously “literary.” Now you were delivering something quite unusual, especially in the context of publishing circa 1968. Fantasy in the late ‘60s was the province of children’s books and the literary ghetto of science fiction, not the mainstream press. You had also succeeded in your goal of making the book both a fairy tale and a parody of the form, which had to be even more confusing. That was six years before William Goldman’s The Princess Bride pulled off the same trick. Nobody was talking about “metafiction” then‌—‌fiction about fiction, fiction playing with the form and making self-referential commentary. In fact, the three books most often credited with officially launching metafiction as a critically-recognized form, instead of the occasional tricksy sport‌—‌John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover’s The Babysitter, and William H. Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife‌—‌all came out slightly after The Last Unicorn did.

Peter: None of that ever occurred to me or worried me, perhaps because with A Fine and Private Place I’d already started out with a fantasy that was reviewed as a mainstream book. And Viking didn’t seem to care, to their credit. What I was mainly worrying about was when the second half of the advance money would show up. It’s like Broadway composer Richard Rodgers being asked which came first, the words or the music, and saying immediately “the check.”

Connor: What happened when the book finally came out?

Peter: Not a whole lot. People think it was a bestseller and got rave reviews from the beginning, but that’s not true. The reviews were quite mixed, and at least one that I remember was the great bomb of my career. Front page of the Chicago Tribune Book Review, that was‌—‌the reviewer hated everything about The Last Unicorn. That was an interesting experience, because I had always wondered what I would feel like when something that completely negative happened…and in fact I felt nothing at all. It was as though he were reviewing someone else’s work, not mine.

Connor: I’ve read all the reviews from that period. My favorites are the people who had said nasty things about A Fine and Private Place back in 1960, but now downplayed The Last Unicorn by saying things like “Beagle’s newest will never be recognized as the modern classic his first novel was…”

Peter: The moral of that story is summed up in one of the few truly wise things Ernest Hemingway ever said. He told a young writer not to pay any attention to book reviewers, one way or the other, because if you believe them when they tell you you’re good, you will believe them when they tell you that you’re bad.

Connor: Given that the Viking hardcover didn’t sell very well, how do you feel about the fact that a truly mint copy with your signature can now command at least $1,000 on the collector’s market?