We assess the association between the local telling of the American Dream story and local entrepreneurship. We use textual analysis on articles related to the American Dream that were published in local newspapers and assess how different thematic narratives of the story are associated with local entrepreneurial dynamism. We find that telling the story spurs local entrepreneurship, in total number and per capita. A one standard deviation increase in articles is associated with a 2 to 8% relative increase in new establishments and the thematic narrative of articles highly influences this effect.