Hemingway wrote a second ending to For Whom the Bell Tolls. As it stands, the novel has a beautifully, maddeningly ambiguous “ending.” Does this new version answer any of the questions we’ve been left with for 69 years? It looks like we’ll find out in late spring, when the JFK Library makes available copies of 3,000+ previously unseen documents from Papa’s Cuban estate. The Associated Press reports:

Now, thanks to an agreement between U.S. Rep James McGovern, D-Mass., and the Cuban government, copies of those writings are at the John F. Kennedy Library.

The archival replicas include corrected proofs of “The Old Man and the Sea,” a movie script based on the novel, an alternate ending to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and thousands of letters, with correspondence from authors Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos and actress Ingrid Bergman. The documents were previewed Thursday and will likely be available to researchers in late spring.

That mention of a screenplay for The Old Man and the Sea is also intriguing. Hemingway wasn’t known to have written screenplays for his works. (The screenplay for the 1959 movie, starring Spencer Tracy, was written by Peter Viertel.) Is this a reference to something he wrote, or is it just a copy of Viertel’s screenplay?

When the documents are opened to the public, I’d be glad to hear from anybody who gives them a look.

Roger Angell - the recently late John Updike’s editor at the New Yorker for 33 years - gives us the inside scoop about a genius at work.

As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: “Which one sounds better, do you think?”

This process sounds old-fashioned, but Updike was probably the very first New Yorker writer to shift over to a computer, back in the early eighties. “I don’t know how this will change my writing,” he wrote to me in advance, “but it will.”

When I became his fiction editor, early in 1976, succeeding William Maxwell, I was alarmed to hear from him that his best fiction-writing days were probably behind him. This was nonsense; his output then was a steady three or four first-class stories per year, but to hear him tell it the end was near. “Fiction is a young man’s game,” he said querulously. I had not yet understood how much he loved sounding old.