Examples:
Composer Charles Ives was a very successful insurance salesman
Poet William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician
Poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive.
I’m looking for other examples, preferably of avant garde artists who made their livings in surprisingly bourgeois ways.
Philip Glass famously drove a taxi and worked as a plumber until somewhere around his early 40s.
Jack London did all sorts of things before hitting the big time as a writer…
“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).