According to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time".
[1] He is best known for his book The Arts of Orpheus (1941), in which he analysed a large number of sources for Orphism and Orphic literature.
His work is noted for its thoroughly sceptical approach to the evidence, attempting to the repudiate the notions of a coherent Orphism put forward by earlier scholars.
[2] His conclusion was that there was no exclusively "Orphic" system of belief in Ancient Greece.
[3] His work had an impact on the scholarship of Orphism,[4] with Eric R. Dodds writing in 1951 that due to Linforth "[t]he edifice reared by an ingenious scholarship upon these foundations remains for me a house of dreams".