As an investment banker, railroad baron, and founder of U.S. Steel Corporation, the nation's first billion-dollar company, J. P. Morgan was deeply involved and influential during a period of aggressive economic growth and industrialism in the United States. He was born John Pierpont Morgan on April 17, 1837, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Junius and Sarah Morgan. His mother came from a preacher's family in Boston, Massachusetts. Morgan's father owned part of a large trading company, and then became partner and later successor to banker George Peabody (1795-1869), an American who made his career in London, England. Junius settled there in 1854 and lived there the rest of his life.

J. P. Morgan was educated in New England and Europe. Seriously ill as a teenager, he had a long and successful recovery in the Azores (a group of islands in the north Atlantic ). At age twenty, he...