However, a series of incidents, which he would later fictionalize in his last novel, Los años, pequeños días ("Years Like Brief Days" published in 1989), led Fabián to abandon that career path and to study law at the University of Costa Rica.
In the 1940s, the Costa Rican communists were allied to the governments of Presidents Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia and Teodoro Picado Michalski, helping to pass the country's first modern social welfare legislation.
During this time, Dobles found employment in the legal department of the state's Child Welfare Agency, and later in the division for savings and subsidies of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund.
After his release, he had difficulty obtaining employment and over the years worked delivering milk, selling blankets, and as an administrator for a lumber depot and for a factory of doors and windows.
With some exceptions (including his last novel, Los años, pequeños días, which is essentially autobiographical), Dobles's literary work is mainly concerned with the struggle for subsistence of simple peasants in rural Costa Rica, or else, notably in Ese que llaman pueblo ("The So-Called People"), with the plight of the urban proletariat.
According to Prof. Edward Waters Hood, a specialist in Latin American literature at Northern Arizona University, Dobles was "one of Central America's best known novelists", whose novels reflected a concern with "the conflict between tradition and change, and the search for an individual and national identity.