‘Astute and gifted editor’ Judith Jones dies at 93
NEW YORK — 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 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 early Wednesday in Walden, Vt. Her stepdaughter, Bronwyn Dunne, said she died of complications from Alzheimer’s.
Few better embodied a life in New York publishing than the slender, refined Jones, whom Tyler once praised 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 ’60s, 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 because it’s raining, something the real editor would never have done.
In an email Wednesday, Tyler wrote that Jones “was both an astute and gifted editor and a remarkable human being.”
Jones was herself an author and gourmet who 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. The year before, she received the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, a fitting prize for Jones, who published Beard and was a close friend.