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CATHERINE RODGERS McLAIN, only child of the union of Bessie Garlington and George Rodgers, was born March 27, 1916, in a house her father built in Camp Hill, a small town in Tallapoosa County, Alabama.  An older half sister, Ruth Rodgers, had been born in 1902, but for all practical purposes Catherine Rodgers felt she was an only child.  At age seven she began writing stories about animals and published her first short story in the BIRMINGHAM NEWS-AGE HERALD in 1937 at age 21.  She continued perfecting her writing craft at both Auburn University, where she received her master's degree in 1941, and later at the University of Alabama.  With several published short stories and sample chapters of an unfinished novel, she was accepted into Hudson Strode's advanced writing class, which was world renowned for turning out published writers.  Strode adhered to the belief that each person has a book in him, and his methods succeeded in helping bring the book out of each of them.  Lonnie Coleman, one of the more successful graduates (Beulah Land, Hot Spell, etc.), said Strode's success was due to the fact he treated the pupils as professional writers already; classmates generally critiqued one another's work in a professional manner.  The technique succeeded well.  Each student was required to complete one novel, and in many cases this led to contracts with publishers.  In Strode's lifetime the class produced 59 published novels and hundreds of short stories.  Some of Strode's other proteges included Walker Percy, Gay Talese, Wayne Greenhaw, Winston Groom ("FORREST GUMP"), Helen Norris ("THE CHRISTMAS WIFE", "THE CRACKER MAN"), Martha Leatherwood Moffett, Thomas Rountree, and John Craig Stewart.  Harper Lee audited the class.  Catherine Rodgers completed her first novel, THE SWINGING GATE, and promptly sold it to Doubleday in 1951.  However, the Korean War had started and the publisher decided an anti-war novel might be unpopular.  Publication stalled for several years and finally the project was shelved altogether.

At the University of Alabama, Rodgers had toyed with the idea of writing a novel rooted in some of her earlier short stories and experimented with writing a few chapters.  To work through the frustration of the publication problems with THE SWINGING GATE, she began to pound out her second novel.  The writing took two years and a third year was spent editing it.  Doubleday promptly purchased this one too.  It was a thirteen hundred-page epic entitled THE INHERITANCE, which Nelson Doubleday took a personal interest in.  He edited it himself, condensed it to one-third its original size, and renamed it THE TOWERS INHERITANCE, a title the author despised.  She felt it lessened the integrity of the book and made it sound like a genre novel.  Despite its ambiguous title, it became a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, a momentous achievement at that time.  It was doing well enough in sales, but then appeared on a blacklist as racist, and in time Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD knocked it off the national charts.  But for two years THE TOWERS INHERITANCE sold better in the South than did TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.  A Spanish version, published in 1961, was likewise successful.  Catherine was heartsick about the allegation of racism.  It was not a racist novel, but rather a period Southern novel which did not happen to center on the racial inequities of the period.  Nelson Doubleday had removed many references to "black" people from the text and replaced them with the epithet "colored" people, which Catherine felt was "corny" and outdated by 1957.  The story concerns the legacy of a small family dynasty in an Alabama lumber town from 1902 to World War I and is generally considered a light-weight romance.  It is that and more.  Anyone browsing through it immediately recognizes that it crackles with life.  The author has subtly ordered her world with such deft precision and smooth pacing that the reader forgets this is a work of art and not life. 
 
The success of this novel allowed Rodgers freedom from work.  So for many years she attended to elderly relatives and devoted much of herself to teaching English at several local schools in Talladega and Tallapoosa counties.  She taught English, she said, in order to provide a needed service but also to keep in touch with young people.  Her marriage to Thomas Jackson McLain in 1960 was a pleasant diversion lasting until his death in 1977.  In 1992 Auburn University commemorated the centennial of women at AU by choosing to honor 100 of the most outstanding women among the alumnae; she was among the first four of its Centennial Women.  Latter years were spent tackling animal rights and environmental issues, and in maintaining the house her father had built at the corner of Rodgers Street and Sen. Claude Pepper Drive.  Her home has been described as a perfect time capsule of 1912 Alabama and as such should be preserved.  Throughout this time she also edited the work of other writers and worked on a biography of her husband's life.  She wrote and rewrote this memoir for the last twenty-five years of her life.  Catherine Rodgers McLain died of cancer July 13, 2004.