American Fiction and the Textual Basis of Corporate Personhood, 1873-1913 offers nineteenth-century corporate personhood as an exemplar of the economically constitutive power of texts. Rather than a collection of natural forces, economics describes social interactions under historically contingent beliefs and commitments encoded and proliferated in texts. Corporate personhood is usually described as a product of the law, as courts and legislatures expand corporate rights. I argue, in contrast, that corporations became “people” because prevailing texts made them economic agents at roughly the time that economic agency came to mean something like personhood. Other modes of envisioning corporations find expression in a wide array of texts across form and genre, highlighting the power of contingent reading practices in making corporate people. In turn, this contingently formed corporate personhood helps to shape the nature of political life, in some instances undermining the basis of political authority in white manhood, and in others accommodating anti-Blackness. In conversation with the new history of capitalism and the “economic humanities,” my research tracks the roles of texts and textual practices in creating economic reality. The dissertation follows Mexican American author Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don against the popular economist, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty to demonstrate the role of uptake in a literary market of sanitizing corporate entities—transforming them from a danger to the republican order to benign economic agents. It continues by reading the celebrity of Mark Twain in the contexts of shifting conventions in advertising and consumer culture to argue that transformations in the meaning of money meant that corporations as economic actors could also be functionally social beings. It continues to read the work of economist Irving Fisher as simultaneously drawing an ontological identity between living beings and income and standardizing formal conventions to remove money and economic life from popular revision. Finally, it reads the dissertation of Sadie T. M. Alexander, the first Black Woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in economics, as an answer to the formal restrictions of neoclassical economics following Fisher. Alexander formulates a vision for Black freedom through the privileged conventions of neoclassical economics.