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Gertrude Hutchinson Merritt was born on July 5, 1902 in New York City to Alfred and Marry Zimmerman, East Prussian immigrants. After her parents separated, she lived in an orphanage for several years, then in foster care and finally in 1911, was back with her father, stepmother and siblings. She attended Columbia School of Librarianship. Merritt worked for the New York Public Library, the Book of the Month Club, in the publishing business and briefly ran a bookstore on lower Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Merritt traveled to the USSR and worked for the Moscow Daily News twice during the 1930s. She traveled to Columbia in 1938 and after U.S. entry into World War II, she moved to the Panama Canal Zone where she was the first medical librarian at Gorgas Hospital until her departure in 1948. Merritt acquired more library training at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. From there she was at UNESCO in Paris in 1949 and in 1950 went to Geneva, Switzerland in 1950, as the assistant to the chief of the World Health Organization Library for three years.

Merritt moved to San Francisco, California, in 1953. In 1954 she met Richard L. Merritt, who became her husband. That same year, Merritt took the position of medical librarian at the new Kaiser Foundation Hospital where she worked until she retired in 1966. She died May 17, 1971