Judith Jones, editor of Julia Child, dead at 93
Judith Jones, a consummate 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 Englishlanguage 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 early Wednesday at her summer home in Walden, Vermont. Her stepdaughter, Bronwyn Dunne, said she died of complications from Alzheimer’s.
Few better embodied and lived out the ideal of a life in New York publishing than the slender, refined Jones, whom Tyler once praised, both as a person and as an editor, as “very delicate and graceful, almost weightless.” Jones worked at one of the leading publishing houses with some of the world’s most beloved authors. She thrived even as Knopf evolved from a family-run business to part of the international conglomerate Bertelsmann AG.
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 that caught on again decades later thanks to “Julie & Julia.”
Tyler, however, thought the movie “stupid” because of a scene in which Jones backs out of a dinner at an author’s home because it’s raining.
“Judith Jones would go through a blizzard,” Tyler told The Associated Press in 2012. “She’s the most indomitable person.”
Jones was 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.
Jones’s husband died in 1996. They had two children and two stepchildren. In recent years, she kept a blog, judithjonescooks.com, and wrote the book “The Pleasures of Cooking for One.”