A Father Who Could Not Read and Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

Dolly Parton was born in Sevier County, in East Tennessee. Her father could not read or write. In a 2016 interview with CNBC, she described him as very smart, a man who could work out numbers in his head.

She has also said that once he was grown, he believed learning to read would simply be too hard. In a letter published on the program's website, she wrote that his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.

Dolly Parton could not go back and change her father's childhood. What she could do was try to make sure other children had books in their hands early, before reading had a chance to feel impossible. In the same CNBC interview she put the idea simply: if you can read, you can keep teaching yourself.

She has described the program as a tribute to her father. Inspiring children to love reading, she wrote, became her mission. Her first hope was modest: to reach the children of her own home county. She was not trying to change the world in a single move. She was trying to help the families closest to where she started.

In 1995, through The Dollywood Foundation, she launched Dolly Parton's Imagination Library for children in her home county. According to the program's official milestones, the first order was 1,760 books.

The idea was practical and steady rather than dramatic. Each enrolled child receives a free book by mail every month from birth until age five, regardless of family income. Over those first five years, a child can build up a shelf of books of their own.

The Imagination Library is not something Dolly Parton runs alone, and she is clear about that. The program says its funding is shared between Dolly Parton and local community partners in each area it serves. In her letter she calls those thousands of local organizations the real heroes of the story, and she invites more communities to help children grow up in homes full of books. Without those partners, a single entertainer's generosity could never have reached so many families.

Growth came step by step. National expansion beyond Tennessee began in 2000, and by 2001 there were 27 local affiliates in 11 states. The program launched in Canada in 2006, the United Kingdom in 2007, Australia in 2013, and the Republic of Ireland in 2019.

The official milestones trace the numbers. The program mailed its one millionth book in 2003, its 100 millionth in 2018, and its 200 millionth in 2023. By 2022 it was sending about 2 million books a month around the world. In 2024 the program reported that about 1 in 7 children under age five in the United States was receiving its books. It marked its 30th anniversary in 2025.

Her father lived to see the program begin. Dolly Parton has written that before he died, he told her the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing she had ever done.

A loss inside one family did not disappear. But it became the reason that many children in many other families started life with books of their own.