Yost finished her fourth year of high school before heading to California to begin work for the film industry.

Soon enough, in 1927, The Los Angeles Times praised Dorothy Yost as being Hollywood’s youngest and most successful scenarist.

[3] By 1927, Yost joined the writing staff of the Film Booking Offices of America Pictures, the same year she married her husband, Dwight Cummings.

In her writing, Yost included a focus on Hollywood’s representation of ethnic and racial minorities as well as regional settings.

Yost held onto a conservative point of view on gender relations, in part because of the societal times but also because of her strict upbringing and involvement with the Unity Church.