Robinson Crusoe Island in his 1719 novel about the character (although the novel is explicitly set in the Caribbean, not in the Juan Fernández Islands). This was just one of several survival stories from the period that Defoe would have been aware of. To reflect the literary lore associated with the island and attract tourists, the Chilean government renamed the place Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Robinson Crusoe Island has a mountainous and undulating terrain, formed by ancient lava flows which have built up from numerous volcanic episodes. The highest point on the island is above sea level at El Yunque. Intense erosion
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