Graham Greene recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and divine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin, and doubt. V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil. Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives –
A. C. Greene Jr. director. James Ward Lee, PhD (born 1931) – an author, professor of English at North Texas since 1958, former chairman of the English Department, and co-director of the Center – called Greene "The Dean of Texas Letters." Annually, Greene's hometown of Abilene, Texas presents the A.C. Greene Award to a distinguished Texas author for lifetime achievement during the West Texas Book Festival. Past winners include John Graves, Sandra Brown, Elmer Kelton, Liz Carpenter, John Erickson, and many others. Greene gave much credit for his love of reading, writing, and storytelling to his maternal grandmother, Maude E. Cole (1879–1961). Besides being