Slums of Lower East Side, New York City, 1900. A boy, maybe three or four years old, wearing ragged clothes, is abandoned in a church by his distressed mother. He flees from a priest and is trapped in a mob storming a Jewish funeral procession. He's knocked into a filthy gutter, hitting his head on the curb. A rat jumps on his chest.
The Angry Orphan is a coming-of-age story that follows Luther Dominic Wolff from coast to coast, from a filthy lower East Side gutter to the clear blue waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Educated in the school of hard knocks, he struggles to survive and protect those even less fortunate as he is confronted by a menacing environment of poverty, crime, treachery, and bigotry. He gets help along the way from an Italian family, an Italian beat cop, a female tutor who runs a neighborhood house for immigrants, and the army during World War I.