his own ancestry that initially made him the focus of the 1938 Racial Laws. By 1939 he was being referred to in OVRA files as a "Jewish writer." Claiming to seek exemption from the Racial Laws for his son, in 1938 Pitigrilli sought a ruling on his marriage from the Vatican, which held it had never happened, as it took place outside the church. They ruled his first wife was effectively a concubine. In July 1940 in Genoa, after he had already been interned as a Jew in Uscio, a small town nearby, Pitigrilli married the attorney Lina Furlan of Turin, who had handled his case with the Vatican. A Catholic, she was violating racial purity laws by marrying someone considered to be Jewish. They had a son in mid-1943, Pier Maria Furlan, who was baptized a Catholic. Career As a young adult, Segre had started working as a journalist and novelist in Turin, a center of literary culture. His early experiences in Paris inspired his most famous novel, Cocaine (1921), published in Italian under his pseudonym of "Pitigrilli". Due to his portrayal of drug use and sex, the Catholic Church listed it as a "forbidden book." It has been translated into numerous languages, reprinted in new editions, and become a classic. Cocaine established Pitigrilli as a literary figure in Italy. It was not translated into English until 1933; it was reissued in the 1970s, and a release by New Vessel Press is scheduled for September 2013. The New York Times wrote: “The name of the author Pitigrilli … is so well known in Italy as to be almost a byword for ‘naughtiness’ … The only wonder to us is that some enterprising translator did not render some of his books available in English sooner.” Alexander Stille, who documented Segre's later collaboration with the fascist government (see below), wrote: In 1924 Segre founded the literary magazine Grandi Firme, which attracted a large readership of young literati. Rising young writers and illustrators had work featured in the magazine. Redesigned by César Civita, the magazine operated until 1938, when the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini banned publications owned by Jews under the anti-Semitic Race Laws. Pitigrilli was noted as an aphorist. Among his most well-known aphorisms are "Fragments: a providential resource for writers who don't know how to put together an entire book" and "Grammar: a complicated structure that teaches language but