Lewis’ mixed heritage likely played a part in how he wrote on the Afro-Native alliances we see in Light and Truth. Robert Benjamin Lewis was born to a Native American woman and African-French man. Apart from knowing his family was poor, little is known about his younger years. Because he was raised by a Native woman, we can guess the plight of Native American peoples could have been equally present in his life alongside the discrimination of Black people inherited from his father. Growing up and living in Maine, Lewis spent the majority of his life in northern New England, traveling as far as Boston to peddle his copies of Light and Truth in the 1830s and 40s. When Lewis was not selling his books, he was a jack of all trades, working as a painter, cook, and inventor (Ernest 2002).
Aside from these biographical facts, Lewis remained outside of organized political or religious communities, leaving us little information to study about Lewis’ adult life. Like
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Light and Truth was first published as four separate pamphlets, which finally culminated into a book in 1836 (Hughes-Warrington 107). When Benjamin Franklin Roberts picked up the rights to printing Light and Truth in 1844, Lewis expanded his ethnology from 167 pages to four hundred pages. This version, noted as “published by a committee of colored gentlemen,” is the edition most widely accessible (Lewis i). The publishing information on this page reveals to us that this version of Light and Truth is the “first known book produced entirely by African Americans, from its author to editors to its printers and subscription agents” (Rusert 79). Light and Truth’s status as the first entirely African American produced book cements the importance of Lewis’ ethnology in the history of African American print