David McKay began a publishing company in Philadelphia in 1882 after purchasing Rees Welsh and Company, a bookstore and textbook publisher. While continuing the bookstore as his primary business, McKay published some controversial works of Walt Whitman, and a collected works of Shakespeare. He sold the bookshop in 1896, and developed a strong line of juvenile books, aided by the acquisition in 1903 of the US branch of George Routledge and Sons. In 1904 the company published Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians.

The David McKay Company was purchased in 1950 by a group of investors led by Kenneth Rawson, who bought a number of other publishing companies which were absorbed into David McKay, including Longmans, Green (US). In 1968 it was sold to Maxwell Geffen, who in 1973 sold it to Morgan-Grampion, where it became a publisher of general non-fiction, including Fodor guide books, which the company had begun publishing in 1950. David McKay was purchased by Random House in 1986.