As a journalist he did much to popularize big game fishing from the 1930s onward, and set a number of records himself.

Farrington wrote and published twenty-four books covering such diverse topics as fishing, railroading, and amateur hockey.

He served as fishing editor of Field & Stream from 1937 to 1972 and counted the American writer Ernest Hemingway, another avid fisherman, among his friends.

[2] His largest catch came in 1952, when he caught a 1,135-pound (515 kg) Atlantic blue marlin off Cabo Blanco, a record for the time.

"[4] Farrington married Sara Houston Chisholm, who became an accomplished angler in her own right, in East Hampton in 1934.