Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri, on April 13, 1937, the son of Ralph Eugene and Violetta Tate Wilson. His childhood home of Lebanon serves as the locale for the plays composing the Talley trilogy.

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His parents divorced when Wilson was five; he then moved to Springfield, Missouri, with his mother where she found work in a garment factory. His mother remarried when he was eleven and the new family moved to a farm near Ozark, where Wilson attended high school, graduating in 1955.

He went to San Diego to visit his father and step-family in 1956, a trip that forms the basis of the autobiographical play, Lemon Sky (1970). Wilson briefly attended San Diego State, but as the play would indicate, the reunion was not a successful one, so Wilson left, moving to Chicago where he lived for six years, working as an artist for an advertising agency and taking a playwrighting course at a University of Chicago extension.

In 1962, Wilson moved to New York, where he quickly became associated with the burgeoning avant-garde theater movement in Greenwich Village. His early plays were produced at Caffe Cino and the La Mama Experimental Theater Club.

In 1969, Wilson, Marshall Mason, Rob Thirkield, and Tanya Berezin founded the Circle Repertory Company. Wilson has continued to be associated with Circle Rep, and Mason has directed the premieres of his productions ever since.

Wilson first reached Broadway in 1968 with The Gingham Dog and has since achieved many successes there; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Talley's Folly and remains one of America's most frequently produced and widely respected playwrights.

Wilson has taken on a variety of subjects in his work; thus overt portrayals of gay men and their lives make up only a portion of his dramatic opus.

His early one-act play "The Madness of Lady Bright" (1964) depicts the demise of a lonely, disturbed drag queen. Balm in Gilead (1965) includes several identifiably gay characters among its enormous cast.

It would be difficult to imagine not portraying Robert in The Gingham Dog (1968) as a gay character; although there are no direct descriptions of him as such, he plays a parallel role to that of Larry in Burn This (1987), who is identified as a gay man. Tom in the one-act "A Portrait of the Cosmos" (1987) is interrogated by an off-stage policeman for having murdered a gay lover.

One of Wilson's most successful portrayals of gay themes occurs in Lemon Sky, in which the main character, Alan (whose situation is based on Wilson's own life after high school), is forced to come to grips with his homosexuality when he attempts a reconciliation with his estranged father.

The play is obviously influenced by Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, in which Wilson performed in a high school production. One sees the pain Alan experiences in Lemon Sky as being a primary force in the development of an artist, one who creates order and beauty out of himself, his past, and his imagination.

Wilson's other major "gay play" is Fifth of July (1978), chronologically the last of the Talley trilogy. Just as Lemon Sky owes a debt to Williams, Fifth of July is influenced by Anton Chekhov.

Kenneth Talley, the play's main character, having lost both his legs in Vietnam, is trying to sell the Talley home in Lebanon to avoid having to live under the microscope of a small town as both a handicapped person and an openly gay man. His lover Jed, on the other hand, is busy on the property planting a formal garden that will take decades to mature.

The play ends with the tentative creation of an alternative kind of family with Ken and Jed at the center, but Ken's Aunt Sally (the same Sally Talley of Talley's Folly now widowed and grown old), his sister June, and his niece Shirley are all part of the extended clan as well. Though their future is uncertain at the play's end, these characters have a chance to be happy and productive together.

It is certainly possible to read some of the heterosexual couples in Wilson's plays as representative of gay people as well.

Matt and Sally in Talley's Folly, for example, face much familial opposition resulting from bigotry and prejudice (Matt is a Jew) and are depicted as sterile, unable to produce children. The interracial couple at the heart of The Gingham Dog, likewise, face enormous societal opposition to their marriage.

Moreover, Wilson frequently creates characters who must operate at the borders of society (the homeless Vietnam veteran Lyman Fellers in Redwood Curtain, for example) or who openly violate societal norms (for example, Pale in Burn This). These characters, too, can be seen as having significant parallels to the experience of gay people.

Wilson is still an actively producing playwright, apparently at the height of his creative powers. As an openly gay man who is successful in mainstream theater, Wilson is a model for many aspiring writers. In his occasional depictions of gay subjects, he proves himself to be a powerful voice speaking of the lives of gay men today.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.

A pioneer in the development of contemporary gay theater, Doric Wilson has been instrumental in Off-Off-Broadway theater in New York City since the early 1960s.

A trailblazer in post-Stonewall gay theater, Cal Yeomans explored sex and sexuality so directly in his critically-acclaimed plays that it made his work difficult to produce even in the gay community.