Long Live Dolly Parton, Giver of Books

Dolly Parton has died, Literary Hub reports, in a personal essay remembering her quiet decades of philanthropy. The country icon founded her Imagination Library in Tennessee in nineteen ninety-five, partly in memory of her own father, who never learned to read, mailing a free book each month to enrolled children until they turned five. By the time of her death, the program had sent an estimated two hundred seventy million books to children in five countries, according to the piece. As the essay recalls, the initiative kept showing up every month without fail, even through crises like the twenty twenty pandemic that strained other institutions.

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