Judith Jones, the editor who discovered Julia Child and advanced a generation of culinary writers that revolutionized cooking and tastes in American homes, and who for a half-century edited John Updike, Anne Tyler, John Hersey and other literary lions, died on Wednesday at her summer home in Walden, Vt. She was 93.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her stepdaughter Bronwyn Dunne said.

Authors and publishing colleagues called Ms. Jones an extraordinary editor — imaginative, versatile, fascinated with stories, curious about people and places, a deft wordsmith and above all insatiable for the pleasures of French cooking. She talked about it, wrote about it and practiced its arts in her kitchens in Manhattan and rural Vermont.

She modestly ascribed her success to being in the right place at the right time. Certainly that was true in 1950, when as a young editorial assistant at Doubleday in Paris she rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejects and persuaded her superiors to publish it in the United States — a stroke of fortune that gave the English-speaking world the intimate portrait of a forgotten girl, the child everyone had lost in World War II.

And Ms. Jones was again in the right place at the right time a decade later when a shopworn 800-page manuscript by three unknown women with no literary credentials landed on her desk at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house in New York. The book, too long and with the uninspired title “French Recipes for American Cooks,” had been rejected by several other publishers.