The Editor
How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America
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5.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
An Economist Best Book of 2024 • A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024
Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this “surprising, granular, luminous, and path-breaking biography” (Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem).
At Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile and passing on projects—until one day, a book caught her eye. She read it in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture-defining career in publishing.
During her more than fifty years as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Jones nurtured the careers of literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike, and helped launched new genres and trends in literature. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Through her tenacious work behind the scenes, Jones helped turn these authors into household names, changing cultural mores and expectations along the way.
Judith’s work spanned decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change—from the end of World War II through the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s equality—and the books she published acted as tools of quiet resistance. Now, based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, her astonishing career is explored for the first time in this “thorough and humanizing portrait” (Kirkus Reviews).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the introduction to this intimate and illuminating biography, Franklin (coauthor of The Phoenicia Diner) writes that editors "must, at once, remain laser focused on their writers' specific needs, while keeping abreast of shifts in the culture at large." In that spirit, Franklin documents the life and career of Knopf editor Judith Jones (1924–2017)—who edited and/or championed such household names as Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Julia Child, James Beard, and Anne Frank—while depicting what publishing was like for women from the 1950s to the early 2000s. A self-described "adventurous girl," Jones began her career at Doubleday and spent more than 50 years at Knopf; developed her love of French cooking while living in Paris, where she met her husband, food writer Richard Evan Jones; and had a knack for spotting shifts in the zeitgeist, leading her to become an early publisher of books on vegetarian cooking, organic gardening, and "ethnic" food. Franklin also spotlights the demands placed on working moms like Jones and many of her authors, and takes brief, revelatory sojourns into those writers' lives, including a stirring section on Black chef Edna Lewis, who was raised in a town founded by formerly enslaved Americans. The result is an exceptional feast for bibliophiles and foodies alike.
