Seeking: Artists WHo Made Their Living in More Mundane Ways

[astorian]

Examples:

Composer Charles Ives was a very successful insurance salesman

Poet William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician

Poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive.

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I'm looking for other examples, preferably of avant garde artists who made their livings in surprisingly bourgeois ways.

[Knorf]

Philip Glass famously drove a taxi and worked as a plumber until somewhere around his early 40s.

[Oakminster]

Jack London did all sorts of things before hitting the big time as a writer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London

[jayjay]

"Patrick Dennis" (real name: Edward Everett Tanner), the author of Auntie Mame and Little Me, in his late middle age, worked as a butler (for, in one case, McDonald's magnate Ray Kroc).