Abstract: A narrative analysis of New Economy romanticism as a stylized genre of media hype reveals how the framing of celebrity business leaders folds individual personalities together with corporate structures in ways that mirror the persistent American confusion over the simultaneously private and public identity of the firm. Media coverage of Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and Jim Clark exhibits a progression away from traditional strategies for legitimizing corporate activity toward antimanagerialism — a romanticized assault on the legitimacy of powerful bureaucratic organizations that paradoxically legitimizes corporate power itself. This argument expands the notion of what counts as governance literature to include business biography and even pop culture narratives, and to embrace a range of broader cultural issues such as the challenge the corporation poses for the American liberal imagination, and the question of what it means to be a person in a corporate society.

Keywords: corporation, big business, artificial person, antitrust, managerialism, antimanagerialism, business biography, narrative,