The word "lonely" is lonely. It lacks an equal opposite. While "lonely" quickly communicates our need to connect, there is no English word for "longing for solitude." What does it suggest that we need more brevity?

Such is the mental tumbles that befall one when considering John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968), especially when reading A Life in Letters, a collection of correspondence from Steinbeck to his closest friends and family.

Steinbeck often stands as a deterrent against our need to codify human identity in simple terms. He forces us to utilize expansive language because he is many things. Many things all at once.

 John Steinbeck in 1959.

In 1926, fresh out of Stanford, although a year shy of actually graduating, Steinbeck accepted a job house-sitting in Lake Tahoe during the winter months.   Lest this sound rather winter wonderland-ish, it was but a few miles from the fated Donner Party incident, if that gives you a sense of its toxic isolation. Amid solitude and snow drifts, Steinbeck culled up Cup of Gold (the imagined sun scorns the page in this novel).
 
Steinbeck also began a lifetime of correspondence to command his demons and initiate (and occasionally end) professional and personal relationships.
 
Of his immediate snow-bound situation in 1926, Steinbeck readily admits his purpose in this pursuit was to tackle a life-long fear of being alone.

Dear Toby:

Do you know, one of the things that made me come here was, as you guessed, that I am frightfully afraid of being alone. The fear of the dark is only part of it. I wanted to break that fear in the middle, because I am afraid much of my existence is going to be more or less alone, and I might as well go into training for it. It mostly comes on me at night in little waves of panic constricting something in my stomach. But don't you think it is good to fight these things? Last night, some quite large animal came and sniffed under the door. I presume it was a coyote, though I do not know. The moon had not come up, and when I ran outside there was nothing to be seen. But the main thing was that I was frightened, even though I knew it could be nothing but a coyote.

Don't tell any one I am afraid. I do not like to be suspected of being afraid. [...]
Letter to Webster F. Street ("Toby"); Lake Tahoe, Winter 1926

A shuddering silence and suggestion of beast must be one of the seeds that bloom social engagement. There is a natural horror at the thought of being completely, utterly alone with only a door separating man from, well, not man. Even Thoreau invited guests to Walden occasionally.   One such person that longed for such solitude, and went to extreme lengths to find it, was French journalist Sylvain Tesson and while he was emotionally besotted when it was denied isolation by the likes of a few snowmobilers, I wonder if he would have really thrived without such human remainder.  
  
Read more about the unbearably extinct quiet places in Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places.
 
A personal and philosophical search for human connection links and motivates Steinbeck's writing, fiction, non-fiction, and correspondence. A decade after his confessed fear of being alone, having achieved some recognition from Of Mice and Men, among other short novels, Steinbeck is plunged into terror at not being left alone.
 
He articulates this fear rather frantically to his literary agent Elizabeth Otis: 

My mail has, with the exception of your letters, become a thing of horror. Swarms of people- money, speeches, orders, and this autograph business. I didn't know it was such a mania. Well, I'm through. I'm signing no books for anyone except friends. It's getting worse all the time.
Letter to Elizabeth Otis; Los Gatos, 1938

In addition to the objectifying requests of strangers, Steinbeck also endured individual visits from friends, including Charlie Chaplin. Mary Oliver once wrote a poem about a world that “comes at me with its busyness…." I reckon old Steinbeck would have nodded helplessly.

His journals show how besieged by guests, his confidence erodes proportionately:

Demoralization is complete and seemingly unbeatable. So many things are happening that I can't not be interested. Viking bought the contract, and every one is happy about it. Pat and all. I wonder if I will ever have a manuscript to turn in on it. Last weekend a big one. Joe and Charlotte Friday and Saturday-Wally Ford and Martha Saturday [and] Sunday. Good time but Jesus, how the work suffers. Wednesday-Dan James and Chaplin are due, Friday-Pare, Saturday-Gail, and George. And me supposed to be working.

[...]

All this is more excitement than our whole lives put together. All crowded into a month. First edition of Long Valley is 15,000. Too much. Too much. I should really not try to write books in the summer. It is just too much. Too much. I feel like letting everything go. But I won't. I'll go and I'll finish this book. I have to. My whole damned life is tied up. Most people would like it tied up. And maybe I do. My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I'm not a writer. I've been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were. This success will ruin me as sure as hell. It probably won't last.
Journal Entry #52, August 16, 1938.

Steinbeck might seem to contradict himself in his dual needs for company and solitude, but only if we require a one-sided exactitude of a person. The reality is the topography of the self is regularly eroding and reshaping.

Solitude, as a theme, has always encompassed this complexity. We are many things; we are many things simultaneously. Rilke's advice to go into oneself was written in a letter to someone else; Annie Dillard's idea of consciousness bound by the conical light of a lamp in a dark room was presented in a book, sure to be read by someone else. Even in Virginia Woolf's "Room of One's Own," the premise of space for artistic creation has more to do with ownership rather than solitude.

"Leaning into the afternoons, I cast my sad nets toward your oceanic eyes. There in the highest blaze, my solitude lengthens and flames, its arms turning like a drowning man's." Lines from Pablo Neruda's ache of emotional longing. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

We commend solitude for its initiation of communion. Communion with our most human selves. And in this way, solitude returns us to others, to everyone. Solitude is not a movement away; it is a movement towards.

For Steinbeck, it was a movement towards his work, his creative being, and deeply held beliefs about human connection as expressed by his work.

I lust to get back into it. Maybe I was silly to think I could write so long a book without stopping. I can't. Or rather, I couldn't. I'll try to go on now. Hope to lose some of the frantic quality in my mind now. It's just like slipping behind at Stanford. Panic sets in. Can't organize. And everybody is taking a crack at me. Want time, want to use me? In aggregate it is terrible. And I don't know where to run. Ought to go into the wild somewhere but I am needed here. Got to calm down. Simply must. I'm jumpy. And it is hot. Good for fog. Don't know who will publish my book. Don't know at all. No reason to let it slide though. Must keep at it.
Journal Entry #49, August 1, 1938.

Fear of being alone and an overwhelming longing for isolation are not incompatible; they stem from the same need to connect meaningfully, a human pulse visible in Steinbeck's complex humanity. There is a comforting abundance of others who are equally inclined: Hermann Hesse, the "shy yet self-expanding" Andy Warhol, not to mention Kafka and Marilynne Robinson.

"Out on the hill, old Oak still stands; stag-headed, fire-struck, bare-crowned." Illustration by Jackie Morris in The Lost Spells

In 1962, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Steinbeck left his home in New York to set off on the great American road trip and find himself again. He also sought to connect to his country. It was, sadly, a failed trip for reasons he details here:

The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away; I had not changed with it. In my memory, it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me.

[...]

When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance—and I wanted to go for the same reason.
From Travels with Charley in Search of America

Steinbeck balances astride the chasm between solitude and communion and occasionally falls into it, clinging to one side or the other. But his words, "I'm frightfully afraid of being alone," could be an anthem for his life. From his philosophy of brotherhood to his daily letter writing to Pascal Covici as a means to spur creativity while writing East of Eden, Steinbeck sought meaningful connection.   Covici was also Dorothy Parker's editor and emotional ballast, as well as the recipient of one of the most famous telegrams about a missed deadline:  
 
"THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CAN'T LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE I HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT NAD DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DON'T KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFCIULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT. Dorothy."

I recommend Olivia Liang's portrait of artists caught in the same chasm and Maira Kalman's expanded empathy for strangers. And then let the time-hewn wisdom of poet Wendell Berry remind us why, above all, we are connected.