09/02/2026
The Imagination Library has mailed more than 300 million free books to kids since Dolly Parton founded it in 1995, and she always said it existed because she never had children of her own.
Parton told Oprah Winfrey in 2020 that not having kids gave her the freedom to build it. She and Carl Dean married in 1966 and assumed they'd have a family, even picking the name Carla for a daughter. She said she was never pregnant, and in the mid-1980s a partial hysterectomy ended any chance of carrying a child. She was 38 or 39.
She described a dark stretch afterward: depression, weight gain, pulling back from work. Over the years she reframed it as a calling instead of a loss. Five of her younger siblings lived with her and Carl for stretches, nieces and nephews called her "Aunt Granny," and she was godmother to Miley Cyrus.
The program mails one book a month to enrolled children from birth until their fifth birthday. It now reaches all 50 states, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Ireland.
Dean died in March 2025 at 82. Parton died August 25, 2026, at 80, after a brief battle with cancer, and was laid to rest beside him.
