George Mortimer Pullman, the son of a farmer and carpenter born in upstate New York in 1831, was one of the most significant figures in American business history. He left school at age fourteen, working in a general store, and then as a carpenter. He moved to Chicago in 1859, where he found work in the burgeoning city. After a brief stint in Colorado he returned to Chicago in 1863 to begin building a new kind of sleeping car for railway travel, which he dubbed the "Pioneer." With a shrewd eye for promotion, Pullman lent his car to the federal government to bear the body of President Abraham Lincoln to Illinois for his funeral in 1865, a gimmick that attracted national publicity. Over the next several years he persuaded several railroads to accept his coaches (which were slightly wider than other railroad cars), and in 1867 he incorporated...