He attended Williams College and Johns Hopkins University, where he received a doctoral degree in 1955.
From 1953 to his retirement in 1987, he served as a member of the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
He was the main architect of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at UNCG.
In 1966, Watson and graduate writing student Lawrence Judson Reynolds began the Greensboro Review, a respected literary journal that has since earned a national reputation.
In 1980, he authored an article, published as "Media Martyrdom" in Harper's Magazine[2] and excerpted as "The Other Side of the Greensboro Shootout" in the Washington Post,[3] in which he defended the Ku Klux Klan for their actions in the Greensboro massacre.