Fitch was born in 1937 in New Haven, Connecticut, to New England parents (John E. Riley and Dorcas Tarr) and raised with two younger sisters in the Snake River Valley in Idaho.

Since then, every book Fitch has written has some connection with Paris and the artists who lived and worked there, including her biographies of Beach, Nin, and Child.

In June 2011, Noel Riley Fitch was awarded the prestigious Prix de la Tour Montparnasse literary award in France for her book Sylvia Beach: Une américaine à Paris (Perrin Publishers 2011), the French translation by Elizabeth Danger of Noel's widely acclaimed 1983 book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation.

Fitch appears in several documentary films, including Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, Berenice Abbott: A View of the Twentieth Century (1992), Paris: The Luminous Years (PBS 2010) and the A&E Biography of Julia Child, first shown October 14, 1997 and based on her book, Appetite for Life.

She is presently writing the story of the Irish woman Louison O'Morphi (Marie Louise O'Murphy) mistress of Louis XV of France, model for Rococo painter François Boucher, and subject of a chapter in Giacomo Casanova's memoirs.