He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know.

From 2003 through 2011 Beagle was involved in a financial dispute with Granada over nonpayment of contractually due profit and merchandising shares. Beagle's work as a screenwriter interrupted his early career direction as a novelist magazine nonfiction author and short-story writer. In the 1970s Beagle turned to screenwriting.

During the last twenty-five years he has won several literary awards including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011. His best-known work is The Last Unicorn (1968) a fantasy novel he wrote in his twenties which Locus subscribers voted the number five "All-Time Best Fantasy Novel" in 1987.