Convenience Big Store

May 12, 2026

What people get wrong — and right — when they try to describe Houston

Of all the poorly written stories told about Houston, and there are many (including mine on many occasions), none disappointed me quite like a novel I stumbled across recently.

The book, about a crusading reporter helping wage the Great Circulation War between Houston’s daily papers, was a racist and sexist caricature of a Houston drowning in corruption and vice. Those are very real issues to this day, but the author used them as fodder for fiction that wasn’t even that funny, the ultimate satirical crime.

Out of respect for the dead, I won’t name the book or its author. But I will say his attempt at scandal got me thinking about what the good Houston literature actually looks like.

So, here are a few quotes that, at least in my delusions, actually try to define Houston.

“Houston is a cruel, crazy town ...

on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.”

OK. Since I can’t not mention this quote, let’s get it over with.

Here’s what Hunter S. Thompson got right in this often-repeated description of Houston from a 2004 Rolling Stone profile of George W. Bush, embraced by some Houstonians as a badge of honor rather than an insult and mischaracterization of their city: Yeah, Houston is sprawling, but that’s low-hanging fruit. And we sure have had our fair share of crooks, ultra-rich and otherwise.

But I think Thompson fell into the same trap as our unnamed novelist by condemning the city — and its culture — for the sins of the good old boys who rule it. Instead, Houston should be defined by the everyday residents who built a refuge in the swamp (not the West) despite them.

Larry McMurtry on Houston

And speaking of good old boys, here is how the late Texas author Larry McMurtry chose to describe Houston in his essay “Love, Death and the Astrodome,” which I first encountered in McMurtry’s collection “In a Narrow Grave.”

“Houston is the kind of boom town that will endorse any amount of municipal vulgarity so long as it has a chance of making money,” McMurtry wrote. (If he were writing that sentence today, I’d hope he’d amend it to something like, “so long as it has a chance of making money ... for the right politicians and their friends.”)

If you’ve been following the ongoing circus of World Cup preparations, the expansion of the George R. Brown Convention Center, the highways that are constantly being built and rebuilt or the whispers about a possible new stadium for the Texans, you will recognize that nothing has really changed.

“I think I’ll like Houston if they ever get it finished.”

Driving through the demolition derby that is, and always has been, Interstate 45, one can't help but think of this quote by Oveta Culp Hobby, the businesswoman, former cabinet secretary and wife of the governor Hobby Airport is named after.

I was a freshman in high school in 2015 (yes, that recently), freshly arrived in Houston, when a history teacher who was really a football coach and not particularly known for his accuracy told our class that I-45 had been under construction since he was a kid and wouldn’t be finished until we had kids of our own.

Based on current projections for the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, he was being optimistic. I’ll be in my 40s before anyone cuts a ribbon on that thing, assuming they ever do.

“It’s easier to get to Houston than it is to get out.”

Houston is far from sexy.

There are no mountains to escape to when the smog settles over the skyline, which itself has not had a meaningful facelift in decades. (The murals Harris County keeps commissioning around downtown are nice, but they’re like lipstick.) No natural lakes to wash away the stress of constant gridlock on crumbling roads. And even the nearest beach looks like a mudpit.

It’s just Houston, Houston, a suburb somehow in between and more Houston in every direction. So vast, so untameable is this region that even the Indigenous people who once knew it best understood that it was only livable for part of the year.

But anyone who has thought of or tried to leave this city, knowing what they’d be leaving behind, understands exactly what the retired West Texas oil well installer Clyde R. Smith meant.

I’ve thought about it myself (for just a second, I swear) before remembering that Houston, strange and stubborn and chaotic and unfinished, made a way for my family and me when nowhere else would.

And how could I, or anyone, give that up?

Jhair Romero, Houston Explained Host

jhair.romero@houstonchronicle.com

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