SOURCE: "Of Wasteland, Fun Land and War," in Saturday Review, March 30, 1968, pp. 21-2.

In the following excerpt, Hicks argues that The Last Unicorn is a fable about imagination and the artist.

Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn is frankly a fantasy, as was his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, which was published in the year he became twenty-one. (In the interval he brought out an unusual and amusing account of a transcontinental trip by motorscooter, I See By My Outfit.)

In the new novel the unicorn, learning from the talk of hunters that she may be the last of her species, sets out to discover what has happened to the others. En route she is captured by members of Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival, and then freed by a melancholy magician named Schmendrick. She and the magician, who joins her in her search for King Haggard and the...