Turner Catledge was born on March 17, 1901. He was the youngest of  two children. His parents were Lee and Willie Catledge. He was born on a 300-acre farm near New Prospect in central Mississippi. Three years later they moved to Philadelphia. There Turner attended the local schools and in his spare time took a series of odd jobs to help his family’s income. He worked at a local newspaper called the Neshoba Democrat.

After graduating from Philadelphia High School in 1918, Turner enrolled at Mississippi A & M to major in science. At that time college was a military school and to earn his board he had to serve meals in the mess hall. He later worked as a secretary to one of the deans. As an assistant to the school’s agricultural editor, he wrote and edited agricultural bulletins that were distributed to Mississippi farmers.

In 1922, Turner worked briefly as a door-to-door salesman and then became editor of the Tunica Times. After a weekly series of anti-Ku Klux Klan articles were written, angry Klan members burned the newspaper plant to the ground. Out of a job, Turner moved to Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1923, where he found work as the managing editor of the biweekly Journal. Eager to test his journalistic skills as a reporter for a metropolitan daily, he joined the staff of the Memphis Press in February 1924. Five weeks later, he switched to the rival Commercial Appeal, which had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for editorial attacks on the Klan.

On August 11, 1929, Turner joined the staff of the New York Times. After working out of its New York bureau for several months, he returned to Washington as the Times’s man in the House of Representatives.   Because he faced an uncertain future at the Times, he accepted a job in October, 1941, as roving chief correspondent for the Chicago Sun. Several months later he was named editor in chief of the financially troubled newspaper. He resigned on March 12, 1943. He later described his experience in terms of not to run a newspaper.

The following month Turner returned to the Times as its national correspondent. Eager to gain overseas experience, he readily agreed to do part time with Red Cross on wartime activities. On his return to the States in December, 1944, he was appointed assistant managing editor.

Because he viewed the Times as a New York metropolitan newspaper as well as a national newspaper, he increased and improved local coverage. He promoted reporter Craig Claiborne, to evaluate the city’s restaurants, and persuaded John Canaday, the director of educational activities of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to take on the challenging post of art news editing. He later opened new Times bureaus in major cities across the country as bases for a fuller national coverage of political, social and economic issues.

On June 1, 1968, Turner was appointed vice-president and director of the New York Times. Until his resignation on January 1, 1970, he acted as a senior adviser to the publisher and to his successor as executive editor, James Reston. Catledge and his second wife, the former Abby Ray Izzard, retired to a French style home in the Gared District of New Orleans. He has two daughters, Mildred Lee and Ellen Douglas, from his marriage to Mildred Turpin Catledge, which ended in divorce in 1958.

Despite his urbanity and what one reporter called "a soft, courtly manner," Turner Catledge has never lost his Mississippi accent or the "porch and pantry" wisdom of his childhood. Later in years he responded to the Times by saying "I get up in the morning wondering what I am going to do this day and before noon I am so far behind that I can’t stop for lunch. It’s easier to work one’s self to death in retirement than at the office." Turner Catledge lived out his life in New Orleans when he died at the age of eighty-two  in April 27, 1983.