Peter S. Beagle

Life

Peter Soyer Beagle was born on 20 April 1939 in the Bronx, New York City, into a family of teachers and artists; his uncles were the painters Raphael, Moses and Isaac Soyer. He grew up in a Jewish neighborhood of the Bronx, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1955, and studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, then held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford.

Beagle was a prodigy: his first novel was written when he was nineteen and published in 1960. He moved to California, married, raised children, played and wrote folk songs, and wrote journalism and nonfiction, including I See by My Outfit (1965), an account of a cross-country scooter journey. His career was later shadowed by a long dispute with his former business manager; in 2019 a California judge found the manager liable for financial elder abuse and fraud, and by 2021 he had regained control of the rights to his work. He has continued to write and publish into his eighties.

Work

A Fine and Private Place (1960) is a gentle, comic ghost story about a failed druggist who has lived for years in a Bronx cemetery, fed by a talking raven, and the dead who keep him company. Then came The Last Unicorn (1968). A Unicorn living alone in a lilac wood learns she may be the last of her kind, and sets out to discover what happened to the others. She is joined by Schmendrick, an incompetent magician whose power comes only when it will, and Molly Grue, a disillusioned cook for a band of third-rate outlaws, and her quest leads to the bleak castle of King Haggard and the terrible Red Bull. The novel is at once a fairy tale and a meditation on fairy tales, on mortality and regret, full of anachronistic jokes and heartbreaking lines; it has never gone out of print.

Beagle's later fiction includes The Folk of the Air (1986), The Innkeeper's Song (1993) and Tamsin (1999), along with many short stories. "Two Hearts" (2005), a coda to The Last Unicorn in which Schmendrick and Molly return, won the Hugo and the Nebula. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011 and was named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master in 2018.

Legacy

Beagle's most direct connection to the broader Tolkien-to-games story is as a screenwriter. When Ralph Bakshi made his animated The Lord of the Rings (1978), the first feature film of Tolkien's book, Beagle co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Conkling; the film, with its rotoscoped orcs and Ringwraiths, arrived a year after Rankin/Bass's The Hobbit and at the height of the early Dungeons & Dragons boom, and it fixed images of Middle-earth in the minds of many early players. Rankin/Bass then turned to Beagle's own novel: he wrote the screenplay for The Last Unicorn (1982), whose voice cast included Mia Farrow, Alan Arkin, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Lee, and which became a cult classic on television and home video. He also wrote the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Sarek" (1990).

Beagle is not on Gygax's Appendix N, and D&D's unicorn — a noble, forest-dwelling creature that allows only maidens near — comes from medieval bestiary tradition rather than from his book. But The Last Unicorn helped define the modern image of the Unicorn as a figure of loss and wild, immortal beauty, and its self-aware, affectionate play with fantasy's conventions — a hapless wizard, sentimental outlaws, characters who know the rules of fairy tales — anticipates the knowing humor of later Comic Fantasy and of tabletop campaigns everywhere.