Judith Jones ’45 New Memoir Featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, and National Public Radio

Long-time Knopf senior editor, Judith Jones ’45 is making publishing news once again with her newly released memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. As an editor at Knopf, she discovered and developed cookbooks by the twice rejected author, Julia Child, as well as, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis, and Madhur Jaffrey, among others.

In addition to detailing how the young Jones began a virtual American food revolution, the New York Times Book Review recounts, “An unintended consequence of Judith Jones’s fine memoir is a wistful longing for the glory days of American publishing.” The New York Times writes that in 1950, Jones, a poorly paid assistant to Doubleday’s Paris editor, worked through the editor’s rejection pile. Shortly into the task, Jones was “drawn to a photograph on the French edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. She did not stop until she had read the manuscript straight through and persuaded her editor to strongly recommend its publication to Doubleday in New York.” Jones, the Times writes, was not only a cooking revolutionary but a “top-flight fiction editor.” In fact, during her long career at Knopf she worked with John Hersey, John Updike, Elizabeth Bowen, and Anne Tyler.

Recently speaking with National Public Radio, Jones reflects about the evolution of cooking in America, and how it is seemingly less accessible for young people, having not learned, as she puts it “at a mother’s or grandmother’s knee.” Young people may be excited by the new cuisine America’s celebrity chefs are creating, but Jones notes “it’s very remote from home cooking and there’s just been too many cookbooks that are beyond the capacity, beyond the pocket book of young people...”

To purchase The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, in bookstores now, click here.

To read the full New York Times Book Review, follow this link

To access the full reviews published in The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, or to listen to the entire National Public Radio interview, please follow the corresponding links.