Dolly Parton's Father Inspired 270 Million Book Donations

Watching her father navigate life unable to read or write planted a seed that would eventually deliver 270 million books to children worldwide.

East Tennessee Children's Hospital in Knoxville announced this week it will be renamed after Dolly Parton, the country music legend whose philanthropy has quietly transformed children's lives for nearly four decades. The hospital has served the region for 90 years and will now deepen its partnership with Parton to treat every child "as one of our own."

For Parton, the honor connects directly to those childhood memories of her father, Robert Lee Parton. "This actually started because my father could not read and write and I saw how crippling that could be," Parton said when receiving the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022. "My dad was a very smart man. And I often wondered what he could have done had he been able to read and write."

That personal pain launched a literacy revolution. What began in 1988 as The Dollywood Foundation in her home county has grown into the Imagination Library, now operating across the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia. The program gifts more than 3 million books every month, mailing one book per month to each enrolled child from birth until their first year of school.

Every book arrives free to families, regardless of income. Parton designed it that way deliberately, wanting to erase the stigma she witnessed affecting her father. "Daddy was a very smart man, but he was ashamed that he couldn't read or write," she told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. "That bothered him. He felt like he couldn't learn after he was grown."

Why This Inspires

Parton's giving extends far beyond books. She donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University for coronavirus research in 2020, raised $13 million for wildfire victims through a telethon, and provides $1,000 monthly payments to families whose homes burned down. In 2022, The Dollywood Company announced it would cover 100% of tuition, fees, and books for all 11,000 employees pursuing education.

The philanthropy timeline started with $500 payments to seventh and eighth graders who finished high school in her home county. It grew to include $15,000 college scholarships, a $1 million benefit concert for local healthcare in 2007, and ongoing disaster relief efforts across Tennessee.

Parton, worth an estimated $450 million according to Forbes, calls the chance to help plant the "seeds" of children's dreams in books "one of my greatest gifts in life." She knows firsthand how books open worlds. "The only thing I ever saw growing up was poor people in overalls and brogan shoes and ragged clothes," she said. "But in my books, I would read about kings and queens with their velvet clothes and big diamond rings. That's how I knew there was a world outside the Smoky Mountains."

A hospital now carries her name, but her real monument is 270 million books in children's hands.