He studied languages at Princeton University and in his leisure time pursued the twin activities of stage magic and folk song collecting.
After leaving Princeton he initially gained employment as a social worker, undertook graduate studies at Harvard, contributed book reviews to the Saturday Review of Literature, and eventually found work in publishing, where he spent the remainder of his career, interrupted for a period during the Second World War when he worked in North Africa and Italy with the Office of War Information in the area of in psychological warfare.
[5] After his first wife's death in 1946 at the age of only 31,[6] he eventually remarried to her sister, the writer Anne Homer, the couple going on to have a further four children,[7] among them the historian Thomas Main "Tom" Doerflinger (1952–2015), in addition to a daughter from his first marriage.
Doerflinger authored three books: The Middle Passage (1939, with Roland Barker), a historical novel about the Guinea Coast slave trade; Shantymen and Shantyboys (1951),[11] republished with additions in 1972 as Songs of the Sailorman and Lumberman,[12] documenting his major musical activity collecting songs from old sailors and lumberjacks between 1930 and 1950 (he recognised from early on that many of the men of coastal New England and Atlantic Canada spent only their summers at sea, and in the winter worked in the forest as lumberjacks, also known as shanty boys), and The Magic Catalogue: A Guide to the Wonderful World of Magic (1977).
[13] His published collection of over 150 maritime and lumberjack songs is acknowledged as a source for the seminal Shanties from the Seven Seas by Stan Hugill[14] and includes the later well known song "The Leaving of Liverpool", which he collected twice from different singers in New York City, as well as others such as "(Bound for) South Australia" and "Poor Paddy Works on the Railway" which became popular in the folk revival of the 1950s-1960s.