Doherty was the author of
This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground (
Little, Brown, 2004),
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (
PublicAffairs, 2007),
Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment (Cato Institute, 2008), ''Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired
(Broadside Books, 2012), Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix
(Harry N. Abrams, 2022), and Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States'' (Libertarianism.org, 2025). He wrote articles published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including
The Washington Post,
The Wall Street Journal, the
Los Angeles Times,
Mother Jones,
Spin,
National Review, the
Weekly Standard, and the
San Francisco Chronicle. Before working for the
Cato Institute in the early 1990s, Doherty served as an intern at
Liberty magazine and wrote on music and popular culture at
The Independent Florida Alligator. As a student at the
University of Florida, where he received a degree in
journalism, ==Personal life and death==