Dorothy L. Sayers was born on June 13, 1893. Sayers was the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, one of the first in a long line of British gentleman detectives.

Sayers was the daughter of a chaplain who began teaching her Latin when she was six years old. She put those lessons to use as a student at Oxford University, where she studied modern languages and medieval literature. Sayers completed her coursework at Oxford with honors in 1915, but at that time, women were not awarded degrees. That policy ended a few years later, and Sayers received her degree in 1920.

After leaving Oxford, Sayers worked for almost a decade at an advertising agency. Some of the ad campaigns and slogans she created are still in use today, and she is credited with coining the slogan "it pays to advertise."

Sayers began working on her first novel, Whose Body? (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) in 1920, and it was published in 1923. It introduced the world to Lord Peter Wimsey, the well-educated son of a duke who is an amateur detective, solving crimes with the assistance of his valet, Bunter, and his police detective friend, Charles Parker. Sayers once described Peter as a cross between Bertie Wooster and Fred Astaire. Over the course of the Wimsey novels and short stories, he is revealed to have a remarkable range of knowledge and talents; by the end of the series, some critics complained that he was too well informed for any one man.

In 1930's Strong Poison (e-book | e-audio | print), Sayers introduced Harriet Vane, a mystery novelist who turned to Peter for assistance when she was falsely accused of murder. Sayers had created the character with an eye towards ending the series by having Peter retire after marrying Harriet. Readers so enjoyed the new character, and the relationship between Peter and Harriet, that Sayers found new life in the series. Peter and Harriet didn't marry until 1935's Gaudy Night (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), after which Sayers wrote only one more novel – Busman's Honeymoon (e-book | e-audio | print) – and a few short stories.

After finishing the Wimsey series, Sayers focused her attention on religious and academic writing. She wrote a 12-part radio drama, The Man Born to Be King, based on the life of Jesus, which managed to anger both sides of the religious divide. Atheists thought it was religious propaganda, and some Christians thought that it was blasphemous not only to have an actor portray Jesus, but to have the characters speak in colloquial contemporary English instead of in the language of the King James Bible. The plays were quite popular, though, and over the years, several new versions have been produced for British radio.

Sayers believed that her best and most important work was her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (e-book | print), published between 1949 and 1962. (Sayers had not finished the third volume, Paradise, at the time of her death in 1959; the translation of that volume was completed by Barbara Reynolds.) The translation has remained popular and is still in print after almost seventy years.

Sayers was one of the charter members of the Detection Club, a group of British mystery writers who met regularly for formal dinners and provided each other with technical assistance in their various areas of expertise. The Detection Club collectively wrote several novels, in which each member wrote one chapter and passed the story on to the next writer in line; the last author was responsible for coming up with a solution that honored all of the clues and red herrings planted by the earlier writers. In The Golden Age of Murder (e-book | print), Martin Edwards argues that in the years between the two world wars, the members of the Detection Club invented the modern detective story.

Lord Peter Wimsey did not die with Sayers. An unfinished Sayers manuscript, Thrones, Dominations (e-book | e-audio | print), was completed by Jill Paton Walsh and published in 1998; Walsh has since written three more Wimsey novels.

David Coomes is the author of the biography Dorothy L. Sayers (e-audio).

Also This Week

June 15, 1215

King John of England and a group of rebellious barons agreed to a charter which would become known as Magna Carta. The document granted the barons certain legal rights – protection from unjust imprisonment and limits on taxation among them – and limited the powers of the king. Neither side held to the charter, resulting in a brief war, but later English kings issued their own versions of the document, which took on a powerful symbolic role in English government. By the 17th and 18th centuries, it was understood as the first step towards guaranteeing the rights of the average citizen. That understanding wasn't historically accurate – Magna Carta dealt primarily with the relationship between the king and the nobility, and didn't say much at all about the lower classes – but it strongly influenced early political life in the United States; much of our Constitution is derived from principles found in Magna Carta. Dan Jones looks at the birth, failure, and long afterlife of the charter in Magna Carta (e-book | e-audio | print).

 June 14, 1820

John Bartlett was born. As a young man, Bartlett owned a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He developed a reputation for his knowledge of quotations and other trivia, and began keeping a notebook of useful quotations to aid him in answering questions brought to him by customers. In 1855, that notebook became the first edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a reference book that has endured for more than 150 years. Bartlett oversaw the first nine editions of the work; the most recent edition is the 18th (e-book | print).

June 12, 1928

Richard M. Sherman was born. Sherman and his brother, Robert B. Sherman, were a songwriting team who wrote songs for dozens of original movie musicals, usually aimed at a younger audience. They worked for Walt Disney for many years; their Disney work includes Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Jungle Book, and several of the songs heard at Disney theme parks, including "It's a Small World" and "The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room."  Not all of their work was for Disney; the Shermans also wrote the songs for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Snoopy Come Home, and Charlotte's Web. More than 50 of their best songs can be heard on The Sherman Brothers Songbook.

June 16, 1938

Joyce Carol Oates was born. Oates has written more than 50 novels and almost as many volumes of short stories. Her 1969 novel Them (print) received the National Book Award; it's the story of a Detroit family from the late 1930s to the 1960s. Oates has said that the favorites of her work, and the books she would recommend as starting points to Oates newcomers, are Them and Blonde (e-book | e-audio | print), a 2000 fictionalized imagining of the life of Marilyn Monroe (Oates emphasizes that it should not be considered a biography).