Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of twelve children born in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee. Her father could not read or write. The family was so poor that the doctor who delivered her was paid with a sack of cornmeal. From these beginnings, she built one of the most successful careers in the history of American music—but it is what she did with that success that places her among the genuinely righteous.
In 1995, Parton launched the Imagination Library, inspired by her father's illiteracy and the doors that had remained closed to him because of it. The program mails a free, age-appropriate book every month to registered children from birth until they enter kindergarten. What began in her home county of Sevier, Tennessee, has expanded to five countries and has distributed well over two hundred million books. Each one arrives addressed to the child by name, because Parton understood that a book with your name on it tells you something important: that you matter, that someone is thinking of you, that the world of ideas is yours to enter.
Her philanthropy extends far beyond literacy. After wildfires devastated Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 2016, she established a fund that gave a thousand dollars per month for six months to every family that lost a home. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she quietly donated a million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, funding research that contributed to the development of the Moderna vaccine. She did not announce it; the information emerged only because researchers listed their funders in their published papers.
Parton has never sought credit for the repair she performs. She deflects praise with humor and rhinestones, insisting she is simply doing what anyone would do. But that is precisely the point: she does what most people only talk about doing, and she does it at a scale that transforms communities. In a world drawn to grand gestures, her work is a reminder that repair can arrive quietly, one book at a time, in an envelope addressed to a child.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."