Judith Bailey Jones was born in New York City on March 10, 1924. She received a degree in English from Bennington College in 1945. After three years as an editorial assistant with Doubleday in New York, she moved to Paris. While an editorial assistant with Doubleday in Paris in 1950, she was responsible for recommending The Diary of Anne Frank for publication.
She started working for Alfred A. Knopf in 1957 as an editor working on translations of French philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1960, she decided to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle. Afterward, she edited culinary writers including James Beard, Joan Nathan, Jacques Pépin, and Lidia Bastianich. When she became vice president, Jones edited some of America's best novelists and nonfiction writers including John Updike, Anne Tyler, John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen, Peter Taylor, and William Maxwell. She retired in 2013.
Jones also wrote books. Her books include My Life in Food, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, and The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. She was the co-author of several books with her husband Evan Jones and Angus Cameron. In 2006, she received the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on August 2, 2017 at the age of 93.
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