The Bridges of Madison County

The Bridges of Madison County (also published as Love in Black and White) is a 1992 best-selling romance novel by American writer Robert James Waller that tells the story of an Italian-American World War II war bride living on a farm in 1960s Madison County, Iowa. While her husband and children are away at the State Fair, she engages in an affair with a National Geographic photographer from Bellingham, Washington, who is visiting Madison County to create a photographic essay on the covered bridges in the area. The novel is presented as a novelization of a true story, but it is in fact entirely fictional.

The novel is one of the bestselling books of the 20th century, with 50 million copies sold worldwide. It was adapted into a feature film in 1995 and a musical in 2013.

Background

Without expecting to, Robert James Waller conceived of The Bridges of Madison County in the early 1990s. On leave from his teaching job at the University of Northern Iowa, Waller was photographing the Mississippi River with a friend when he decided to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County, Iowa. This event, alongside a song Waller wrote years earlier about "the dreams of a woman named Francesca", gave him the idea for the novel, which he completed in eleven days. After he had written The Bridges of Madison County, Waller came to believe that he had based the character of Francesca Johnson on his wife, Georgia, whom Francesca physically resembles.