In 1952, Copland received a commission from the League of Composers, funded by a grant from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, to write an opera for television. While Copland was aware of the potential pitfalls of that genre, which included weak libretti and demanding production values, he had also been thinking about writing an opera since the 1940s. Among the subjects he had considered were Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and Frank Norris's "McTeague" He finally settled on James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", which seemed appropriate for the more intimate setting of television and could also be used in the "college trade", with more schools mounting operas than they had before World War II. The resulting opera, "The Tender Land", was written in two acts but later expanded to three. As Copland feared, when the opera premiered in 1954 critics found the libretto to be weak. In spite of its flaws, the opera became one of the few American operas to enter the standard repertory.