The Coral Island are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and "The Coral Island" is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that in comparison to "Robinson Crusoe" such books generally replaced some of the original's romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as "The Coral Island" and Frederick Marryat's 1841 novel "Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific".
Despair (novel) was his "first serious attempt... to use English for what may loosely termed an artistic purpose" and finished on December 29 later that year. Nabokov sent the manuscript to Hutchinson & Co. in April 1936 and although the company had initial reservations, eventually agreed to publish the book and the translation was checked by a Molly Carpenter-Lee, a student of Nabokov's friend Gleb Struve. The book was a complete flop commercially and Nabokov only earned €40, a minuscule amount, even in the 1930s. The issue was that Hutchinson's only published cheap, "popular" novels, which "Despair" was not and thus, it