Judith Jones

Judith Jones (born 1924) worked for more than 50 years as a literary and cookbook editor collaborating with dozens of renowned authors. Jones is known for having rescued the The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile. Jones also championed Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She retired as senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf in 2011. Jones is also a cookbook author and has written memoirs. Jones has won multiple lifetime achievement awards, including the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

Jones joined Knopf in 1957 as an assistant to Blanche Knopf and editor working mainly on translations of French writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Before that she worked for Doubleday, first in New York City and then in Paris, where she read and recommended The Diary of Anne Frank, pulling it out of the rejection pile. Jones recalled that she came across Frank's work in a slush pile of material that had been rejected by other publishers; she was struck by a photo of the girl on the cover of an advance copy of the French edition. "I read it all day," she noted. "When my boss returned, I told him, 'We have to publish this book.' He said, 'What? That book by that kid?'" She brought the diary to the attention of Doubleday's New York office. "I made the book quite important because I was so taken with it, and I felt it would have a real market in America. It’s one of those seminal books that will never be forgotten," Jones said.

Jones's relationship with Julia Child similarly began when Jones became interested in a manuscript that had been rejected by another publishing house. After her years in Paris, Jones had moved to New York, where she was frustrated with the ingredients and recipes commonly available in the US. She tested Child's recipes and decided: "This was the book I had been searching for." In America's postwar years, home cooking was dominated by packaged and frozen food, with an emphasis on ease and speed.

After the success of Child's cookbook, Jones continued to expand the resource options for American home cooks. "I got so excited by Julia's book and what it did for making people better cooks, and the tools that you needed to make it really work in an American city or small town, and I thought, If we could do this for French food, for heavens' sake, let's start doing it for other exotic cuisines!" Jones recalled. "I used the word "exotic," and that meant the Middle East with Claudia Roden, it meant better Indian cooking with Madhur Jaffrey."

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