Macmillan and Company was founded in New York in 1869 as a distribution agency for Macmillan and Company of England. It was renamed The Macmillan Company at the time of incorporation in 1896, when the British company became Macmillan and Company.

The American company began publishing in 1886, drawing great benefit from the publication of titles from the parent company's list. The Macmillan Company rapidly developed its own momentum and established itself, under the leadership of George Edwards Brett, his son George Platt Brett, and their descendants, as one of the most vigorous and innovative publishers in the world. It developed a strong education department and by 1926 texbooks accounted for 50 per cent of sales. The company was known for its publication of significant scholarly books, and in 1919 was the first in America to set up a separate children's department. In the twentieth century it published first editions of a number of outstanding best-sellers, including Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. In the 1950s it initiated a number of important paperback series.

Although members of the British Macmillan family remained on the board of the American company until 1951, when it became fully independent, the company had been semi-independent from the 1890s. It was acquired in 1960 by Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, Incorporated, which called itself Crowell-Collier and Macmillan from 1965. In 1973 this company became Macmillan, Incorporated, the parent company of a large number of subsidiaries acquired in a sustained program of expansion and acquisition. The name Macmillan Publishing Company survived as a publishing subsidiary. In 1995 the British and American firms were reunited as subsidiaries of the Holtzbrinck publishing group.