Dolly Parton's Imagination Library: The Thing She Actually Did

Dolly Parton grew up in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, in Sevier County in the Great Smoky Mountains, one of twelve children. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, could not read or write. He signed his name with an X on the mortgage for the family home.

In nineteen ninety-five, when Parton was already one of the most successful entertainers in American history, she started a program in Sevier County to address childhood illiteracy. The Imagination Library mailed one book per month to every registered child from birth through age five, free of charge, regardless of income. No application process. No means test. One book a month, every month, for sixty months.

The program worked. Sevier County kindergartners showed measurably better literacy readiness than comparison groups. Other communities asked to replicate it. Parton and her foundation developed a model that allowed local partners to operate the program in their own communities, with Parton's foundation providing infrastructure and matching support.

By two thousand twenty-two, the Imagination Library had distributed more than one hundred seventy-five million books across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. It had grown into one of the largest childhood literacy programs in the world, run entirely outside government funding.

Parton has said that the Imagination Library is the most important thing she has ever done. Given the breadth of her career, that is a considered claim. Her father died in two thousand twelve and learned to read in his later years, in part because his daughter had convinced him to try. She has spoken about that publicly. A program that mailed books to other people's children began with one she could not give her own father until it was almost too late.