William Main Doerflinger (1910–2000) was an American book editor, author, stage magician, and folk song collector. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up on Staten Island and spent holidays on Long Island Sound, developing an early love of the sea. He studied languages at Princeton, and in his leisure time pursued stage magic and folk song collecting. After his third year he visited Nova Scotia, where he performed magic shows and collected over 60 songs that formed the basis of his 1931 thesis “Shantymen and Shantyboys.” He later undertook graduate studies at Harvard and eventually found work in publishing, spending the remainder of his career as an editor at Macmillan and E.P. Dutton — where his authors included Woody Guthrie, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Françoise Sagan — interrupted by wartime service with the Office of War Information in North Africa and Italy.

Between 1930 and 1950, Doerflinger collected songs from retired sailors at Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island, from the Seamen’s Church Institute in Manhattan — where he found Patrick Tayluer, one of his most prolific sources — and from fishermen and lumbermen in the Canadian Maritimes. This fieldwork produced his major work, Shantymen and Shantyboys (1951), later expanded and republished as Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman (1972, 1991). The collection of over 150 maritime and lumberjack songs is acknowledged as a source for Stan Hugill’s seminal Shanties from the Seven Seas. His field recordings are preserved at the Library of Congress.

Doerflinger is commemorated by the William Main Doerflinger Memorial Sea Shanty Sessions at the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug Harbor, Staten Island.