When his wife dies young, Canadian immigrant ironworker, Jim Fulton, is left with four children he hardly knows and a neighborhood of relatives willing to help raise them. But his stubborn independence keeps getting in his way as he grapples clumsily with a world changing fast and sometimes violently. Set in the Long Island suburbs and up on the girders of the Manhattan skyline in the early 1970's, Motherless Children is both a riotous family saga and a sobering confrontation with the 20th century white American working class as it struggles to overcome inherited prejudice.