Alumni News

SF Chronicle Lauds Jones '45 as "God Among Editors"

San Francisco Chronicle food and wine editor Michael Bauer dedicated a recent blog entry to author and longtime Alfred A. Knopf editor Judith Jones '45, whose latest memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Foodhas received favorable reviews from The New York Times and elsewhere.

Image of Judith Jones

"Jones, more than any other person, has made cookbook authors as respectable as her translations of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre," said Bauer.

"She's the person responsible for publishing Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and just about all her other books. She turned Marion Cunningham into the modern-day Fannie Farmer, and she brought the soulful recollections and recipes from Edna Lewis to us all. She's edited James Beard, Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, Lidia Bastianich, Madhar Jaffrey, and the list of who's who in the cooking world goes on."

Jones, a Knopf editor for more than 50 years, was also responsible for bringing Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl to America, and was the longtime editor of John Updike. Now 84 years old, Jones continues to work fulltime as an editor at Knopf.