As Southern California's throttle-wide-open Punk scene reaches its peak, famed writer and poet Johnny Salinger struggles to exhume the meaning of his own existence. Tortured over whether the tragic death of his fiancée was set into motion by happenstance or fate, he attempts to end his self-loathing spiral by setting out on a one-way road trip in search of a redemptive crossroads that may come too late. From the angst-fueled parties in Venice Beach, to the booze shacks of New Orleans, Salinger is joined by an unforgettable cast of uninhibited misfits who carry a brazenly raw and sometimes burlesque cocktail of narratives. Cursed is the Road to the American Dream is told through the gin and wine-soaked diaries of three lost souls, desperate to find their piece of the "Great and Wonderful Everything."The intoxicatingly nostalgic prequel to the Kerouac prose-inspired companion novel, Nobody Special: The Death of Johnny Salinger, Cursed is the Road to the American Dream is gritty, lust-for-life storytelling.... It's Catcher in the Rye on punk rock Benzedrine.This uncensored "Twentieth Anniversary Edition" includes a Forward and Afterward by Kimberly Salinger, along with never before published entries that reveal deeper insights behind the broken icon's reluctant rise and fall from becoming one of the American underground's most enigmatic anti-heroes.