Joseph Lewis

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Joseph Lewis (11 June 1889 - 1968) was an American freethinker and atheist who was born in Montgomery, Alabama. At the age of nine he left school to find employment and became mostly self-educated. Lewis developed his ideas from reading, among others, Robert G. Ingersoll and Thomas Paine.

In 1920, Lewis moved to New York where he became the president of Freethinkers of America (a title he would keep for the rest of his life). He later started his own publishing company, the Freethought Press Association, where he published literature about freethought written by himself and others. In the 1930s, Lewis expanded his business with a subsidiary, Eugenics Publishing Company, that published literature for common people written by medical experts about subjects such as contraception.

A bulletin, Freethinkers of America, was started by Lewis in 1937. In the 1940s it was renamed Freethinker and in the 1950s to its final name Age of Reason (named after Thomas Paine's book The Age of Reason). Contributors to the bulletin were, among others, William J. Fielding, Corliss Lamont and Franklin Steiner.