George Landon Watson was born at Muncie, Indiana, on 16 April 1907, and educated at Columbia University. Between 1928 and 1931 he was living in New York City, from at least the latter year with a married woman named Florence L. Carnovsky (1896–1984). By 1936 the couple had moved to Wilton, Connecticut, and they eventually married at White Plains, New York, on 1 November 1955.
Watson described himself officially as a writer, but the only work he is known to have produced is his biography of A. E. Housman, A Divided Life, published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1957. By the time the book appeared Watson had become curator of the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut (Modern Language Notes, vol. 73, no. 3 (Mar. 1958), p. 225), and he is referred to by this title in the acknowledgements of a work published in 1974 (Wrightson Collection, vol. v). He died at Lakeville, Connecticut, in August 1976.