The woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this colorful biography of legendary editor Judith Jones. When Judith Jones began working at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, the twenty-five-year-old spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book 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.
Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Jones celebrated culinary diversity, forever changing the way Americans think about food. Her work spanned the decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change. From the end of World War II through the Cold War; from the civil rights movement to the fight for women’s equality, Jones’s work questioned convention, using books as a tool of quiet resistance. Now, her astonishing and career is explored for the first time. Based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America (Atria, 2024) tells the riveting behind-the scenes-narrative of how stories are made, finally bringing to light the audacious life of one of our most influential tastemakers.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)
Amrita Ghosh, "Kashmir's Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts" (Lexington Books, 2023)
Benjamin Balint, "Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy" (Norton, 2019)
Thersa Matsuura, "The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth" (Adams Media, 2024)
Robert Cochran, "Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis" (U Arkansas Press, 2024)
Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)
Sohini Pillai, "Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Rebecca Copeland, "Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Gina Chung, "Green Frog: Stories" (Vintage, 2024)
Eileen M. Hunt, "The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Edwin McRae, "Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds" (Narrative, 2024)
Chris Haufe, "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Jan Baetens, "Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Adi Mahalel, "The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song
Nicholas Taylor-Collins, "Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature" (Manchester UP, 2022)
Benjamin Brose, "Embodying Xuanzang: The Postmortem Travels of a Buddhist Pilgrim" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
Laura Helton, "Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
Black Beauty
Anne of Green Gables
New Books in Economics
New Books in Anthropology