Harrington is noted for the massive volume of his documentary output, most of which remains unpublished: the shelf space in the National Anthropological Archives dedicated to his work spans nearly 700 feet.

Harrington completed his Stanford undergraduate degree with courses at a summer school at the University of California at Berkeley where he met Alfred Kroeber.

He was to hold this position for 40 years, collecting and compiling several massive caches of raw data on native peoples, including the Chumash, Mutsun, Rumsen, Chochenyo, Kiowa, Chimariko, Yokuts, Gabrielino, Salinan, Yuma, and Mojave, among many others.

The massive collections were disorganized in the extreme, and contained not only linguistic manuscripts and recordings, but also objects and realia of every stripe; a later cataloger described how opening each box of his legacy was "an adventure in itself.

[7] Harrington's attention to detail, both linguistic and cultural, is well-illustrated in "Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of California," one of his relatively few formally published works.