Isabel Briggs Myers (born Isabel Briggs; October 18, 1897 – May 5, 1980) was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year. Background Isabel Briggs Myers grew up in Washington, D.C. where she was home-schooled by her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. Her father, Lyman J. Briggs, worked as a research physicist. Briggs had little formal schooling up until she attended Swarthmore College, where she studied political science. During her time at the college she met Clarence "Chief" Gates Myers who was studying law. The two married in 1918 and were together until his death in 1980. When Briggs Myers died in 1980 she left the copyright to the MBTI (which was little known at the time) to her son Peter. Fiction In 1928, she responded to a magazine advertisement for a National Detective Murder Mystery Contest by writing a novel titled Murder Yet to Come. Her novel won the contest and was published serially in 1929. It applies her ideas about personality type to a murder mystery. The contest prize included a $7,500 cash award and a contract for a second work of fiction. Briggs Myers fulfilled her obligation by writing the novel Give Me Death, which revisits the same detectives from Murder Yet to Come. In it, a Southern family commits suicide one by one after learning they may have "Negro blood". The novel was published in 1934 and received harsh treatment from critics. MBTI personality indicator As WWII broke out, Briggs Meyers read an article titled, “Fitting the Worker to the Job,” and she recognized a need for a “people sorting instrument,” especially as US involvement in the war in Europe seemed more likely. She wrote her epiphany in a letter to her mother, who was a staunch Carl Jung enthusiast. Briggs Myers implemented the ideas of Carl Jung and added her own insights. She then created a paper survey which would eventually become the MBTI. The test was to assess personality type and was fully developed after 20 years of research by Briggs Myers with her mother. The three original pairs of preferences in Jung's typology are Extraversion and Introversion, Sensing and Intuition, and Thinking and Feeling. After studying them, Briggs Myers added a fourth pair, Judging and Perceiving.