2013 Essays

Dorothy Yost

Tomadjoglou, Kim

“Dorothy is another one of the family who has inherited the art of writing—it is a YOST talent,” wrote Kathryn Yost Boyd in 1925 in an unpublished family history. In 1927, the Los Angeles Times praised Dorothy Yost as being Hollywood’s youngest and most successful scenarist (28). They exaggerated. Although she did begin working in the motion picture industry as a teenager, she would have been as old as twenty-six at the time the article was published, not so young by young Hollywood standards. A prominent writer whose career spanned both the silent and sound eras, Yost worked on more than ninety-four films throughout her lifetime, including Alice Adams (1935) starring Katherine Hepburn, That Girl From Paris (1936) starring Lily Pons, and the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Swing Time (1936), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). Despite such achievement, the personal life and career of Dorothy Yost remains marginally documented, and little attention has been given to her silent period films, of which only a few survive.