West attended Girls' Latin school, now called Boston Latin Academy, graduating at 16, and went on to Boston University and the Columbia University School of Journalism. She won several local writing competitions. Her first published work, a short story entitled "Promise and Fulfillment", appeared in The Boston Post when she was 14 years old, She was inspired to start writing stories by an advertisement for a writing contest she saw in her aunt's copy of the NAACP's magazine Crisis, which her mother thought carried news she wanted to shield her daughter from. West reportedly wrote her first story at the age of seven. If she could not help us see ourselves with the humor, however wry, that gives the heart its grace, she would never have forgiven herself for letting our spirits be crushed before we had learned to sheathe them with pride. She was easing our entry into a world that outranked and outnumbered us. As she marched us down out front stairs, she would say what our smiles were on tiptoe to hear, "Come on, children, let's go out and drive the white folks crazy." She said it without rancor, and she said it in that outrageous way to make us laugh. Whenever we went outside the neighborhood that knew us, we were inspected like specimens under glass. She detailed how her mother guided her and her many cousins, all with varied skin tones, into the inhospitable world: Late in life she wrote that in Boston Blacks "were taught very young to take the white man in stride or drown in their own despair". Dorothy West was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 2, 1907, the only child of Virginian Isaac Christopher West, who was enslaved at birth and became a successful businessman, and Rachel Pease Benson of Camden, South Carolina, one of 22 children.
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