Lately, I’ve been reading the memoir of Howard Fast (Being Red). Fast — the grandfather of commentator Molly Jong-Fast — was a novelist, a magazine writer and for 12 years a member of the Communist Party who went to prison rather than divulge names of party members and others to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

He was also a war correspondent on a fraught flight in North Africa, when an engine caught on fire, and only a small blue bulb illuminated the cargo plane’s interior. And there sat a young serviceman reading a book by this dim light. He was a poor kid from East Tennessee, as Dolly had been, who grew up never reading a book, and now even in wartime, or especially in wartime, he was devouring books, in the small paperback Armed Services Editions published and made available to troops.

As Fast recalled:

I pressed him to tell me what there was about the book that had impressed him so, what kept him reading even when the engine caught on fire. “It’s a book,” he said, a statement he repeated again and again,… Treston had been born and educated in the hill country of Tennessee. Drafted right after high school, he had been trained by the air force as a navigator. Before he had encountered the Armed Services Editions, he had neve read a book. Comic books, school texts, but never a novel. Now he had discovered the novel, and he lived for nothing else.

In his present existence, there was a war and an air force, and neither was of any importance to him. Books were important; books were his life; and he existed from book to book, living in each new world that opened to him.

Dolly Parton was, among many other things, a lover of books which she gave away to children who, like the young aviator, had perhaps never read one. Also born and raised poor in Appalachian Tennessee, Dolly Parton believed that books opened new worlds to readers. This, along with her music will be her enduring legacy.

“My, how time flies,” she wrote in her last message to Imagination graduates. “It seems it was only yesterday when your family and friends read you your first story. You were just a baby. Now you’re five years old and about to go to school. How exciting!

“This may be your last book from my Imagination Library but you have to promise me you will keep on reading. If you go to your local public library you will find a great number of books just for kids your age. Every book is a treasure and every time you open one up you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.”

Dolly Parton, R.I.P.