If you want to write literary fiction, hang out in the groves of academe.
True.
Gore Vidal used to sneer that American fiction could be divided into two broad categories: popular fiction and "university fiction," which was written and read exclusively by people at universities.
This may have been simply Vidal's way of patting himself on the back for writing critically-acclaimed bestsellers. It is true, however, that in this group, authors who wrote "serious" or literary novels mostly worked out of universities.
Of the 11 authors who wrote a literary first novel, 9 earned graduate degrees in writing or literature. 10 teach or taught writing and/or literature at a university.
If they repaired to the univesity out of a sense that the outside world was inhospitable to literature, they were right. Nobody managed to build a long career publishing non-genre fiction with a major publisher. Lowry had the best run, with six novels, but for the last dozen years she has written exclusively nonfiction. Ducker followed his literary bent but shifted to small presses, as did Leviant. Poverman, Bredes, and Swigart turned to the crime genre. Others just gave up writing novels. The average number of novels published, for non-genre writers, is 3.6, compared to 6.7 for writers in the popular genres.