After Ole Miss, a New Challenge

James H. Meredith, the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi 27 years ago, has been hired by conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who has opposed civil rights bills and other domestic programs favored by many blacks. Meredith, 56, has changed his views markedly over the years. Integration is the “biggest con job ever pulled on anybody,” he has said. “My understanding of the senator’s position . . . is that every citizen has the entitlement to every right. So there’s no need for any specific rights. And I agree with that.” Meredith said that he had been hired to advise the senator on questions of race, education, drugs and urban problems, after providing informal advice for the last year.

--Ernest Hemingway had a reputation for playing hard. Apparently, he worked hard too. Hemingway labored for six months over the final chapter to his second novel, “A Farewell to Arms,” writing scores of different endings before settling on the version that appeared in print. “There’s this image of Hemingway as a raucous, drinking guy and not a guy sitting so carefully at his desk and slaving over the ending. Most people would instead picture Hemingway dashing the ending off and going out to catch a marlin,” said Lisa Middents, assistant to the curator of the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. An exhibit of some of the 44 pages of draft endings, mostly handwritten, goes on display today at the Hemingway Collection. The exhibit commemorates the 60th anniversary of the novel’s Sept. 27, 1929, publication by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The novel, set in Italy and Switzerland during World War I, chronicles the romance between a young American ambulance driver and an English nurse at an American Red Cross Hospital in Milan.

--Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) took exception with U.S. News & World Report’s depiction of Tennessee as a backward state. In last week’s issue of the magazine, there was a listing of what various jobs pay around the country, but the map of Tennessee was upside down and backward. In a humorous protest letter to U.S. News Editor-in-Chief Mort Zuckerman, Gore said that though no one might notice if one flipped Wyoming or Colorado, that is not so when Tennessee is turned inside out. “I hope the magazine didn’t mean to move Memphis,” Gore wrote. “As you know, every Federal Express package in the country must first pass through Memphis. Put the city in the wrong place and the entire U.S. economy would fall apart. . . . “