This study challenges the widely-held view that success in personal relationships is the only key to happiness. It argues that we pay far too little attention to some of the other great satisfactions of life - work and creativity. In a series of biographical sketches it demonstrates how many of the creative geniuses of our civilization have been solitary, by temperament or circumstance, and how the capacity to be alone is, even for those who are not creative, a sign of maturity.