A Literary Legacy

Judith Bailey Jones ’41 began a career as an editor, starting out at Doubleday, where she plucked the Anne Frank manuscript from a slush pile and pushed it into publication. She moved on to Knopf, first editing translations of Camus and Sartre for an American audience, then ultimately applying her lifelong love of language to eminent authors like Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Tyler and William Maxwell.

In addition to keeping company with such authors throughout her more than 50 years in publishing, she was perhaps best known for recognizing the merits of then-unknown Julia Child’s monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which had been rejected by another house. Judith went on to make household names of Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, M. F. K. Fisher, Edna Lewis and Marion Cunningham, among others. 

 Judith retired from Knopf in 2009 and went on to write several books of her own, including her memoir, The Tenth Muse. She passed away in 2017 at the age of 93.