Judith Jones, editor of Julia Child, dead at 93
Judith Jones, a literary editor who helped revolutionize American cuisine by publishing Julia Child and other groundbreaking cookbook authors, worked for decades with John Updike and Anne Tyler and helped introduce English-language readers to The Diary of Anne Frank, has died at age 93.
Jones, who spent more than 50 years at Alfred A. Knopf before retiring in 2011, died on Aug. 2, 2017 at her summer home in Vermont. Her stepdaughter, Bronwyn Dunne, said she died of complications from Alzheimer's.
Moviegoers would learn about her in Julie & Julia, the 2009 film starring Meryl Streep as Child and featuring Erin Dilly as Jones. In the early 1960s, she signed up the then-unknown Child and Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a landmark release.
Jones was herself an author and gourmet. She collaborated on several cookbooks with her husband Evan Jones, contributed to numerous food magazines and wrote the memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, published in 2007. In 2006, she received the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, a fitting prize for Jones, who published Beard and was a close friend.
Discovering The Diary of Anne Frank
Jones was born Judith Bailey in 1924 and grew up in Manhattan. She majored in English at Bennington College, worked as an editorial assistant at Doubleday while still in school and in her early 20s was a reader for Doubleday in Paris. Among her early achievements was finding a masterpiece amid the rejects: The Diary of Anne Frank.
"One day my boss said, 'Oh, will you get rid of these books and write some letters.' He went off to have some lunch with some French publishers," she explained in a 2001 interview with the Associated Press.
"I curled up with one or two books. I was just curious. I think it was the face on the cover. I looked at that face and I started reading that book and I didn't stop all afternoon. I was in tears when my boss came back. I said, 'This book is going to New York and has got to be published.' And he said, 'What? That book by that kid?!"'
Discovering Julia Child
Jones' most famous discovery was Child, a middle-aged American chef in the early 1960s, who had returned to the United States after living for years in Paris. She and co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle were seeking a publisher for a cookbook (later titled by Jones Mastering the Art of French Cooking) which had been rejected by Houghton Mifflin. As recounted in her memoir, Jones was soon convinced that "this was the book I been looking for" and thought Child's recipe for "boeuf bourguignon" worthy of the best dishes in Paris.
In recent years, she kept a blog, judithjonescooks.com, and wrote the book The Pleasures of Cooking for One.