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 colorful biography of legendary editor Judith Jones.
When Judith Jones began working at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, the twenty-five-year-old spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book 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.
Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Jones celebrated culinary diversity, forever changing the way Americans think about food.
Her work spanned the decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change. From the end of World War II through the Cold War; from the civil rights movement to the fight for women’s equality, Jones’s work questioned convention, using books as a tool of quiet resistance.
Now, her astonishing and career is explored for the first time. Based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, The Editor tells the riveting behind-the scenes-narrative of how stories are made, finally bringing to light the audacious life of one of our most influential tastemakers.
Sara B. Franklin is a food writer and historian. She received a 2020–2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) public scholars grant for her research on Judith Jones and teaches courses on food culture, writing, and oral history at NYU’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study and via the NYU Prison Education Initiative at Wallkill Correctional Facility. She is the author of Edna Lewis and The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. She holds a PhD in food studies from NYU and studied documentary radio and nonfiction at both the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Find out more at SaraBFranklin.com.
