The Editor

Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th centuryincluding Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plathfinally gets her due in this surprising, granular, luminous, and path-breaking biography (Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem). At Doubledays 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 projectsuntil 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 whos 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. Judiths work spanned decades of Americas most dramatic cultural changefrom the end of World War II through the civil rights movement and the fight for womens equalityand 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).