Someone should write a book just about the day jobs (and sources of income generally) of famous people. It's hard to imagine an aspect of history that's more overlooked.
My favorite example of this is Kafka, who worked for an insurance company. Who else but someone working in a large, bureaucratic organization could have written the kind of stuff he wrote? And his work contains some of the best reflections on the nature of modern life, the fact that we're just in this huge machine and understand at most 0.00000001% of it.
Jorge Luis Borges in a book of memoirs told that when he worked in the library in Buenos Aires as a clerk one day one of his colleagues barged into his office to show him an encyclopedia (or list of famous people, or something like that) that showed another argentinian named Jorge Luis Borges, a famous writer at that, who was born on the very day that Borges was born! (of course, it was an article about himself)
Nobel prizewinner J.M. Coetzee's "Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II" has an interesting look at his life as a computer programmer in London in the 1960s.
Non Nobel-winner Michel Houellbecq's book "Whatever" is a dark but somewhat hilarious story obviously based on his former day job as a computer programmer.
Jorge Luis Borges, a critic of the Peróns, was once promoted from his position at a municipal library in Buenos Aires to something like "Chief Poultry Inspector". He never filled the post.
I would perhaps not infer too much about Tom Eliot's feelings towards his day job from a few letters to a worried mother an ocean away and a polite resignation letter. Even Eliot's letter to Ezra Pound, which expresses quite a different view of his work at the bank ("Of course I want to leave the Bank..."), must be read with some suspicion because of Pound's, shall we say, strong opinions about banking and finance.
I would be surprised, actually, if no dissertations have in fact been written on this topic. The Pound connection alone makes that unlikely.
Any dissertations presumably would lack this material, because Eliot's letters are only just being published. That's what's behind the OP and a good many recent posts about the renascent Eliot.
It's astonishing that Eliot's letters are only being published now (and then only a small, early fraction of them). The reason appears to be that his second wife, who was much younger than he, is still alive and exercising tight control of his legacy.
Pound's mentorship of Eliot is well known, of course. What Pound doesn't mention in the letter where he praises The Waste Land as the poem of the century is that he himself had edited it practically to the point of co-authorship.
Without PacBell, Scott Adams would never have given proper birth the Dilbert or The PHB. He said that he kept that job long after the success of the comic book just for the source material. He was particularly amused when somebody from a comic (who was being made fun of) would ask him to autograph their particular strip.
They've since fixed it. There's also this solecism: "nobody wants to think about the poet [...] pouring over actuarial tables". Though it's true I don't want to think of my favorite poets destroying perfectly good actuarial tables by pouring over them.
