
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
The closest companion for drugs and early-1920s European decadence.
Read our take
by Pitigrilli
A cynical journalist moves through sex, scandal, cocaine, and decadent Paris at the beginning of the 1920s.
Pitigrilli’s fast, satirical novel follows a young Italian journalist through Parisian nightlife, cocaine, erotic freedom, scandal, and moral disintegration.
A young journalist enters a sophisticated Paris world in which cocaine, sex, ambition, and self-destruction are never far apart.
The novel makes sophistication, nightlife, drugs, and self-destruction part of the same fast-moving social world.


The closest companion for drugs and early-1920s European decadence.
Read our take

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.
View author
Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.
View author
War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.
View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Cocaine, its publication, and its place in literary history.

The primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Cocaine.
Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
Contemporary reporting or criticism used to document the historical reception and context of Cocaine.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.