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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 “.

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