Richard Lee Merritt was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1922. He attended the University of Montana (then called Montana State University) from 1941-1943, where he was enrolled in the Journalism School. He served in the military during World War II, assigned to Headquarters, 364th Fighter Group, United States Army Air Force. While in Europe he frequented book shops and purchased several books he later gifted to the University of Montana's library. Following the war he returned to the university, helped to reactivate the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, was tapped for Silent Sentinel, and graduated in 1948 with a degree in English.

Following the war Merritt moved to Paris on the G.I. Bill. He went to the Alliance Française for six months, to the Sorbonne from 1949-1950, and then to Mallorca, Spain, with friends. He returned to Montana in 1950 and worked for Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph for three years. Following another short stint overseas he moved to California in December, 1953. In February 1954 he got a job as a reference librarian for the San Francisco Examiner, where he worked until his retirement in 1977.

Merritt met his wife, Gertrude Hutchinson, in 1954. She was a medical librarian at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Francisco. They both valued frugality in daily living and grew their savings. Together they bought and repaired old houses, and then rented or sold them. They lived from 1955 until their deaths in a Victorian in Noe Valley they paid off in less than four years. They both enjoyed travel and took six-month tours of Europe by car in 1963 and 1969. They were also regular contributors of money and books to the University of Montana library. Following Gertrude's death in 1971, Richard established the Gertrude Merritt Memorial Fund for the library to purchase foreign literature books in original and translation.

Merritt continued to purchase houses after Gertrude's death, and helped friends grow gardens of fruit, vegetables and roses. Following his retirement, Merritt started two long-time volunteer activities. For over twenty years he worked with a group picking up litter in Golden Gate Park. He also received training and then worked as a volunteer tutor for over ten years at the Adult Learning Center, working with, in his words, "English-speaking adults who had been short-changed in their early schooling." In the 1990s, as his hearing became worse, Merritt turned from tutoring to writing and produced two book-length manuscripts and dozens of short stories.

In 1997, Richard Lee Merritt established the Mnemosyne-Minerva Fund to support the University of Montana's Mansfield Library, and continued to donate books from his extensive collection until his death. Merritt died in San Francisco in December 2017, leaving his body to science and an estate valued at over $2 million to the library.