The Book Pages: The woman who got Anne Frank’s diary into print
In the Book Pages this week, find out about the incredible publishing career of Judith Jones, the subject of Sara B. Franklin's biography, "The Editor."
Sara B. Franklin is the author of the just-published biography, “The Editor,” which explores the life of publishing legend Judith Jones. A writer, teacher and oral historian with a Ph.D. in food studies, biographer Franklin was just 26 when she met the then 88-year-old Jones and began interviewing her about her life and work. As Franklin shares in the Q&A this week, the remarkable Jones, who spent more than 50 years working at Knopf and was only its second female editor, was responsible for the English-language publication of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” as well as editing cookbook and food writers such as Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Marcella Hazan, James Beard and Madhur Jaffrey among others. Jones also worked with authors Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Langston Hughes, Shirley Hazzard and more. Read on as Franklin shares more about Jones, “The Editor” and the books that made a difference in her own life.
Q. Your book “The Editor” is about Judith Jones. Can you tell readers a little about her, please?
Judith Jones was a legend in 20th-century publishing and committed her life to helping tell stories of all kinds as a means by which we might better understand one another and ourselves.
And, while you may not know Judith’s name, you know her work: She is responsible for the publication of Anne Frank’s diary in English (as a secretary working at Doubleday in postwar Paris, she refused to accept her boss’s dismissal that the book was “just” the private musings of some kid. Judith understood the power of voice and knew Anne Frank’s would change the world. She was right).
The list of authors she worked with is far too long to name here (there were over 100 of them), but to give a sense: Judith was Sylvia Plath’s American editor while Plath was alive. She published “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by a then-unknown Julia Child. She discovered the novelist Anne Tyler and worked with her for decades. She was John Updike’s longtime editor, too. She nurtured the talent of William Maxwell, John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen, Langston Hughes, Peter Mayle, and Sharon Olds. And she is the editor-cum-collaborator behind America’s most iconic cookbooks and their authors, including Edna Lewis, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Lidia Bastianich, Joan Nathan, Irene Kuo, Marion Cunningham, and many, many more.
Q. Would you please share a bit about her influence on food writing?
To the extent Judith is known at all outside the publishing community, it is primarily for her work in food; she is inarguably the most influential cookbook editor of all time.
She played an outsize role in shaping American food culture, from our tastes and preferences to the techniques and cuisines we are familiar with to what ingredients are available to us here in the U.S.
As soon as Judith became an editor at Alfred A. Knopf in 1957 (she was only the second woman editor at the publishing house; the first was Blanche Knopf, the house’s co-founder), she began pushing against convention, blurring the lines between our private and public lives, and championing voices that others in the industry had trouble hearing the value of.
This included publishing cookbooks. Judith treated cookbooks with the same literary rigor as the many other forms of writing she edited, which included poetry, fiction, history, memoir, journalistic reportage, and scholarship. In doing so, especially at a house with as much literary prestige as Knopf, Judith imbued the daily—and largely unpaid and invisible—work of getting food on the table with value in our culture. Many of the cookbooks she published gave voice to individuals and identity groups whose stories were rarely given any space in mainstream American culture at the time: women, people of color, queer folks, immigrants, and folks for whom English wasn’t their first language.
While Judith wasn’t out in front with her politics, her work asked readers to expand their notion of who, and what, was considered part of American culture.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
I’m an academic, writer, and lifelong bookworm, so the list is long! For biography, Jenn Shapland’s “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.” For cookbooks, Edna Lewis’s “The Taste of Country Cooking” (which Judith edited) and Ronni Lundy’s “Vittles.” I read a lot of poetry, and some poets especially close to my heart are Natalie Diaz, Muriel Rukeyser, Joy Harjo, Christian Wiman, Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, Ada Limón, Marie Howe, Denise Levertov, and Aracelis Girmay. I read one novel at a time, but always have several works of nonfiction going at once. Some of the books that have influenced me most are “Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde, “Inciting Joy” by Ross Gay, “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson, “How to Do Nothing” and “Saving Time” by Jenny Odell, Zadie Smith’s “Intimations” and “The Living Mountain” by Nan Shepherd.
Q. What are you reading now?
Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours,” which I read when I was way, way too young to understand it. I’m finding it extraordinarily moving. I’m also reading “Modern Poetry” by Diane Seuss and Marie Howe’s “New and Selected Poems.” In nonfiction, I’m toggling between Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s Always This Year,” Maggie Nelson’s “Like Love,” “Zero at the Bone” by Christian Wiman, and a galley of “Survival Is a Promise,” a forthcoming biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is one of my favorite contemporary writers and thinkers.
Q. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?
I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which I loved in part because she read it herself. You can hear the insight in her voice. “Fight Night” by Miriam Toews is one of my favorite novels of all time, and I’ve listened to it several times since first reading it. Georgia Toews, the author’s daughter, narrates the audiobook perfectly, nailing the heartbreak and laugh-out-loud humor. It’s just stupendous.
Q. Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more?
Nonfiction, because of the nature of my own writing and my academic work, and children’s and YA books because I’ve got young kids.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
Probably my mom above all.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience you’re willing to share?
Finding my mother’s notations in her books of poetry– mostly Mary Oliver and May Sarton – right after she died in 2008. My mom was a very wise but private woman, difficult to love and be loved by and hard to read, too. Finding those notes gave me access to pieces of her she’d kept to herself and has helped me know and understand her better over time.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
Clearly, I don’t do a good job of being decisive, as I’m always reading so many things simultaneously. I mostly ignore reviews and publicity hype, but take personal recommendations very seriously, especially those of my sister-in-law, Marissa, and two of my closest friends, KayCee and Molly. And, maybe most influential of all is my public library; between my kids and me, we tend to have upwards of 40-50 books checked out at any given time. I almost never buy novels, so whatever fiction comes up on my queue usually gets bumped up on my priority list.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
Both my parents were big readers, and there were always tons of books in our house growing up. When I was a young kid, my mom did most of the bedtime reading to my older brother and me. I can’t tell you exactly why, but “A Chair for My Mother” by Vera B. Williams really sticks out, as do “The Snowy Day” and “Peter’s Chair,” both by Ezra Jack Keats. We read a ton of Jerry Pinkney’s books, and I remember being both fascinated and terrified by “The Talking Eggs.” The first chapter books I read to myself that really shifted my worldview were “Julie of the Wolves,” by Jean Craighead George (which, I realized when I read it to my own kids a couple years ago, is badly outdated in its political language) and “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry.
Q. Can you recall a book that felt like it was written with you in mind (or conversely, one that most definitely wasn’t)?
So many of the books I’ve mentioned above felt like they were speaking directly to me, perhaps Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain” above all. I’d add to that list four books that feel like part of my DNA as a mother/writer/thinker at this point: “The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem” by Julie Phillips, and three contemporary poetry collections: “The Carrying” by Ada Limón, “I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World Anymore” by Kendra DeColo, and “I Do Everything I’m Told” by Megan Fernandes.
Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?
“We are entangled. That’s the word. We are f—ing entangled. And any movement toward disentangling ourselves from each other, all these aspects of each other, is wreckage. It’s wreckage.” Ross Gay said this in conversation with the poets Danez Smith and Franny Choi on the Vs. Podcast. It has been seared into my mind ever since.
Q. Do you have a favorite book or books?
Most of my favorites are listed above, but I’d add “Autobiography of My Mother” by Jamaica Kincaid, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” by Deesha Philyaw, and “Be Holding” by Ross Gay.
Q. Which books do you plan, or hope, to read next?
Next up are “Real Americans” by Rachel Khong (which is probably already overdue back to my public library; I’m a slow reader) and “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel (that’ll be a rare time when I’ve watched a screen adaptation before reading the original book, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the profound beauty of that story since I watched the HBO series last year).
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
What catches my eyes depends on the genre, but also, more importantly, where I’m at in my own life.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I can’t think of anything. I’ve deliberately been very transparent about the close personal relationship I developed with Judith Jones in the final years of her life, and my process since, both in “The Editor” and in interviews I’ve given about it.
Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?
What part of a book – mine or otherwise – do you read first (for me, it’s always the acknowledgments)?
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