- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.

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.