Peter Soyer Beagle was born on April 29, 1939, in the Bronx, New York. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1959 at a somewhat earlier age than most. He then attended graduate school at Stanford University from 1960 to 1961. On May 8, 1964, he married Enid Elaine Nordeen, and they had three children. They divorced in July of 1980. He has lived much of his life in California, and from 1968 to 1969 he was vice-chairman of the Santa Cruz chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He married Indian author and photographer Padma Hajmadi, and they are well-known habitues of the environs of Davis, California.

Beagle once declared that he did not write sequels, and he resisted writing another novel about unicorns for many years after the publication of The Last Unicorn (1968), the novel that made him famous, even though his publisher urged him to write another...