Dolly's Imagination Library

Of everything Dolly Parton built, the one she talks about most is not a roller coaster. It is a book program. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was a smart man who never learned to read, and that shame stayed with her.

So in nineteen ninety-five, right here in Sevier County, she started the Imagination Library. The idea is simple. Every month, a brand new book arrives in the mail, addressed to a child, from the day that child is born until the child turns five, at no cost to the family.

The first order was fewer than two thousand books, all for local children. It did not stay local for long. The program spread across the United States and then abroad, into Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.

By twenty twenty-three it had mailed its two hundred millionth book, and it now sends out roughly three million books every single month. Well over a million young children in the United States are enrolled. Dolly's own children, in a sense, call her the Book Lady.

She likes to say she does it for that little girl she once was on Locust Ridge, and for a father who could build anything with his hands but could not read a bedtime story. It began as a gift to the poorest county she knew, and it turned into one of the largest childhood literacy efforts on Earth.