The Editor

Franklin's subject, Judith Jones, edited Julia Child, Anne Tyler, and John Updike at Knopf, and this biography's real interest is how much unpaid, uncredited shaping editors like Jones did to define postwar American literary and culinary taste. Franklin draws on interviews she conducted with Jones years earlier for a doctoral dissertation, which gives the book access most biographies of editors lack, since editors rarely leave behind the kind of paper trail authors do. The book is frank about the limits of Jones's power within a male-dominated publishing hierarchy, but its sympathies clearly lie with its subject throughout, favoring admiration over harder scrutiny of the choices Jones made. It's a valuable corrective to author-centered publishing history, even if it stops short of a fully critical reckoning.