Why was Lonesome Dove banned? The Texas lawmaker who raised the idea admitted he hadn't read the book
A Pulitzer winner and a Texas institution, Lonesome Dove spent a stretch of 2023 as the most discussed book in the state legislature. The reason involves a bill hearing, a keyword search, and a novel nobody in the room had read.
Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has sat on Texas high school library shelves for four decades. In March 2023, it spent about a week as the most famous book in America that might not be allowed to stay there.
It was never actually banned — not statewide, not by the Texas Education Agency, and not on any of the district removal lists compiled by PEN America. What happened was a legislative hearing that went sideways.
The hearing
On March 21 and 22, 2023, the Texas House Public Education Committee took testimony on House Bill 900, the READER Act, authored by Rep. Jared Patterson, a Republican from Frisco. The bill would have required book vendors to review and rate every title they sold to school libraries for sexual content, with the TEA able to override the ratings.
Rep. James Talarico, a Round Rock Democrat, brought up his favorite novel. Lonesome Dove contains nine sex scenes, a sexual assault, and a cast that includes prostitutes. Would it come off the shelves under HB 900?
Patterson said he hadn't read it. Then he answered anyway.
"They might need to ban Lonesome Dove," he told the committee.
He did not walk it back. Asked about it again by the Texas Tribune, he said he'd count removing any novel with sexually explicit material as a win for Texas students, Lonesome Dove included.
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Why that particular book was a problem
McMurtry's cattle-drive epic is one of the few cultural objects in Texas that conservatives and liberals both claim. Texas Monthly's Christopher Hooks noted that even people in McMurtry's hometown of Archer City who dislike his other work make an exception for this one. Patterson's allies and opponents agreed on approximately one thing that week: naming it was a mistake.
The cleanup was its own event. Christin Bentley, a State Republican Executive Committee member, bought the novel on Kindle and ran keyword searches for a list of explicit terms. Finding none of them, she announced the book was "not sexually explicit" — a methodology that tells you a fair amount about how the shelves were being audited.
What happened to the bill
- June 2023 — Gov. Greg Abbott signs HB 900, saying the law "gets that trash out of our schools."
- August 31, 2023 — Austin's BookPeople and Houston's Blue Willow Bookshop win a preliminary injunction from Judge Alan Albright in the Western District of Texas.
- January 17, 2024 — a Fifth Circuit panel upholds the block on the vendor-ratings scheme while leaving the state library collection standards intact. Rehearing denied that April.
- October 2025 — Albright makes the injunction permanent, calling the ratings guidelines vague and holding that READER compels speech. "But READER's methods are not the way to further that interest", he wrote of the state's stated goal.
- May 2026 — Texas appeals again, arguing it was never acting as a regulator, merely as a customer choosing what to buy.
Texas remains the national leader in school book removals. PEN America counted 801 titles pulled across 22 districts between July 2021 and June 2022 alone. Lonesome Dove isn't among them. The 1989 CBS miniseries was never touched either.
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