William Main Doerflinger

William Main ("Bill") Doerflinger (July 30, 1910–December 23, 2000), was a book editor, stage magician, author, and noted American folk song collector, with a particular interest in maritime songs (sea shanties).

Growing up, Doerflinger spent his school days on Staten Island and holidays on Long Island Sound where he acquired an interest in the sea. He studied languages at Princeton University and in his leisure time pursued the twin activities of stage magic and folk song collecting. After his third year at Princeton he visited Nova Scotia where he performed magic shows and collected over 60 songs that formed the basis of his 1931 Princeton thesis "Shantymen and Shantyboys", later the title of his major published folksong collection. 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. During his career as an editor for E.P. Dutton and Macmillan Publishing he assisted a wide range of authors including Sir Edmund Hillary, Françoise Sagan and Woody Guthrie whose autobiography Bound for Glory was edited/"organized" by Doerflinger's first wife, Joy (Homer), and published in 1943. After his first wife's death in 1946 at the age of only 31, he eventually remarried to her sister, the writer Anne Homer, the couple going on to have a further four children, among them the historian Thomas Main "Tom" Doerflinger (1952–2015), in addition to a daughter from his first marriage. Other than his collecting trips in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and New England, he collected a number of his songs from residents at Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island, New York, which was set up as a retirement home for destitute sailors.

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