The cold and the dark have fueled writers for centuries. During winter in the country, “there’s so little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard,” wrote Anton Chekhov, for whom the harsh Russian winter was often a character as much as a setting. In Iceland, where some winter days get about four hours of sunlight, roughly one in 10 residents will publish a book in their lifetime, according to one estimate.

A similar current runs through the long, bleak winters in Syracuse, N.Y., which has been called both the rainiest and snowiest city in the United States. But it isn’t widely regarded as a literary haven. It’s often known for its annual state fair, gargantuan shopping mall and college sports.

And yet, the upstate city has been fertile ground for a parade of American literary giants over the decades. Toni Morrison penned much of her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” while working there. David Foster Wallace worked on “Infinite Jest,” his 1996 opus, in a tiny apartment near Syracuse University. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there as a child, as did the new journalism pioneer Lillian Ross. Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff have taught at Syracuse University, where George Saunders is currently a professor.

Today, a thriving indie literary community is carrying on the tradition, with residents organizing backyard reading series and community writing workshops. “There’s some sort of pull to the area that doesn’t exist elsewhere,” said David Haas, who runs the Instagram page @SyracuseHistory. “This area has totally been forgotten over time. It’s a Rust Belt city, and we’ve declined just as others.”

Long winters and short days mean more time spent indoors and greater space for introspection. And though the cost of housing has been rising recently, Syracuse is still a more affordable place to live than many urban centers, drawing artists who can create without the burden of paying exorbitant rent.

“Not being a high-profile city is appealing to writers. You can just get your work done in anonymity, in some peace and quiet,” said Tim Carter, the director of writing workshops at the Writers Voice of Central New York. “It’s a place where you can work and create and not have to battle all these other things like a high cost of living.”

In a time of A.I.-generated slop, book bans, funding cuts and a nationwide affordability crisis, making art has become an especially grim occupation. Many writers have been struggling to find work, and artists have been leaving New York City in droves. But how has Syracuse maintained its standing as a haven for creativity?

Like many cities with industrial pasts, Syracuse has faced a torrent of economic and social hardships into the 21st century. According to estimates from 2019 to 2023, it had a child poverty rate of nearly 50 percent. Its population has been declining, from around 220,000 in 1950 to 145,000 in 2025. An old and deteriorating housing stock has been plagued by lead.

It wasn’t always this way. Syracuse was once a thriving metropolitan center with several flourishing industries. Producing much of the nation’s salt in the 1800s, it earned its nickname as “the Salt City.” In the early 1900s, it was known as “The Typewriter City,” home to several typewriter factories. And at one point, it became “The Gear City.”

“They were making everything here,” said Robert Searing, the curator of history for the Onondaga Historical Association. “It was a major place that was drawing people from everywhere.”

This included the publishing industry. In the 1960s, Toni Morrison was living at home with her mother in Ohio, divorced and jobless. She had subscribed to The New York Review of Books, and one day she saw in the back of the magazine a job posting that read: “A major publisher requires an executive editor.” The ad had been taken out by L.W. Singer, a textbook publishing house in Syracuse. Morrison applied, got the role and moved there.

Inspired by a memory of an incident she witnessed as a child, she was working on a story “about a Black girl who wanted blue eyes,” Morrison said in a 2012 interview. She had two young sons, and she would write “before they got up and after they went to bed just as something to do.” In 1970, this story would be published as “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison’s debut novel.

“Having this opportunity to go to a place that has the kind of cultural environment, but also has the freedom that she needs to be a writer, is critically important,” said Dana A. Williams, author of the 2025 book “Toni at Random,” about Morrison’s editing career. Random House, which had acquired L.W. Singer, moved Morrison to New York. She continued writing novels and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Morrison died in 2019.)

Around the 1980s, in Syracuse, “everything starts to fall apart,” said Mr. Searing, pointing to the decline of American manufacturing.

For its literary community, a new phase was about to begin.

Dirty Realists, Poets and Novelists

Raymond Carver started teaching at Syracuse University in 1980. He was already building a name for himself as a short-story writer with distinctive, minimalist prose, but he had struggled with alcoholism and money problems.

Syracuse “was a place where he could work, afford a house, and stay put,” wrote Carol Sklenicka in her eponymous biography of Carver. With the writer Tess Gallagher, he purchased a four-bedroom house that he decorated with his peacock feather collection. In 1981, Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” made him a household name, known for his “dirty realism.”

In the classroom, Carver ripped cigarettes while he lectured. He shaped the writing program, bringing in Tobias Wolff to join the faculty and convincing Jay McInerney to attend as a student. “Everybody in the class would smoke,” Mr. McInerney recalled recently. “Carver was a master of using the cigarette to pause or to substitute for a sentence.”

Mr. McInerney had been living in New York City. Carver told him he needed to come to Syracuse to focus on his work. There, in six weeks, the young writer finished a draft of “Bright Lights, Big City,” the debut novel that would put him on the map. This April, he published his latest book, “See You on the Other Side.”

Carver died of lung cancer in 1988, but his influence over the program is still felt. Bruce Smith, a poet and English professor, arrived in 2002. He was choosing between Syracuse and the University of California, Santa Barbara, “where I could’ve had a smoothie on the beach,” he joked.

He chose Syracuse because “it had a certain gravitas,” Mr. Smith said. “Ray Carver was here, the reading series is named after him. It was a place I was attracted to because of its attention to the word.”

Affordability was another factor. Mr. Smith bought his house in 2002 for $100,000 and still lives there with the poet Jules Gibbs, author of the collection “Snakes and Babies.” In the 2010s, the two turned their garage into a three-story writing studio.

“As artists who were struggling to make ends meet, we didn’t have to be house poor,” Ms. Gibbs said. “Unfortunately, that’s changing now. Things are getting more expensive and prices are getting inflated.”

Still, compared with other cities known for incubating creativity, Syracuse remains affordable, with an average rent of $1,600, according to Zillow, versus $3,750 in New York or $2,660 in Los Angeles. In Syracuse, “you can tend bar and write your book,” Ms. Gibbs said. “You can do some adjunct teaching and write your book.”

That was part of what lured David Foster Wallace, who was born in nearby Ithaca, to Syracuse in the early 1990s. He had been battling addiction, and he was looking for somewhere calm with low rents.

“I lived in an apartment that was seriously the size of the foyer of an average house,” he told the journalist David Lipsky, adding, “There were so many books, you couldn’t move around. When I’d want to write, I’d have to put all the stuff from the desk on the bed, and when I’d want to sleep, I would have to put all the stuff on the desk.”

Wallace developed a steady routine: waking up early to go to sobriety meetings, lifting weights and laboring away on what he called “the Project,” wrote D.T. Max in his biography, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.” Wallace moved to Illinois for a teaching job after roughly a year in Syracuse, and in 1996 “the Project” would be published as “Infinite Jest,” launching him to fame. In 2008, Wallace died by suicide.

‘Like Eastern Russia, but With Shopping Malls’

It snowed as recently as April this year, which isn’t all that surprising for Syracuse. The climate can create a world of forced introspection. “There’s a way that the weather manifests in our behaviors and bodies and countenance,” said Ms. Gibbs. “It’s not bad for artists to dwell in that kind of meditative state sometimes.”

Mr. McInerney recalled he once said that Syracuse “was like Eastern Russia, but with shopping malls.”

“The sun would disappear in November,” he said. He was once told by an editor “to write about the worst things that ever happened to you.” The darkness, he added, helped bring that out on the page.

The city’s decline has also created a sense of urgency for its writers.

“There’s so much working against us — a sagging population, economic downturn, bad climate,” Ms. Gibbs said. “It’s the ultimate grass-roots mind-set of, ‘Nobody’s coming to save us, we have to do this ourselves.’ So for creative types, how do we reach out through our work and uplift other people?”

There are many community-centric organizations focused on developing writers, often led by graduates of the university, who’ve been increasingly staying in the area, Mr. Smith said. “It used to be that you would get your Syracuse M.F.A. and then you go live in Brooklyn or Philadelphia,” he said. “More and more, people have tried to make a life in central New York.”

In 2020, Jacob Gedetsis, a Syracuse M.F.A. graduate, founded Write Out, which organizes after-school creative-writing workshops attended by more than 800 students. Mr. Carter, another M.F.A. graduate who stayed in Syracuse, said his organization, the Writers Voice, teaches about 500 people each year. He also hosts a backyard reading series, assembling writers from across the region.

“Syracuse is a D.I.Y. city,” he said. “If you build it, people will come.”