The South is where it's at, bitches. Literarily speaking, anyway.

Seriously, guys. The South is the place to be if you're a literary American writer (as opposed to a pulp-fiction American writer, or some kind of weirdo foreign writer). Here's a really short list of Southern writers, many of whom have been said to be the greatest writers of whatever style it is in which they write (and a couple are said to be the country's greatest writers ever): 

Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Kate Chopin, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston.

Beat that, you damn yankees.