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 a married Italian-American woman (WWII war bride) living on a Madison County, Iowa, farm in the 1960s. 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 60 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 Bridges, Waller came to believe that he had based the character of Francesca Johnson on his wife, Georgia, whom Francesca physically resembles. Analysis According to Marc Eliot, Waller's novella is a modernization of the Noël Coward play Still Life (1934), which was adapted into David Lean's film Brief Encounter (1945). Still Life is about "the desperation, guilt, and temptations of two married people who meet, fall in love, commit adultery, and then separate forever". In The New York Times, Brigitte Weeks said that Bridges had appealed to "middle-aged, world-weary people" in a manner similar to the writings of James A. Michener, though it features more sexuality than Michener's books. The Bridges of Madison County received multiple comparisons to Erich Segal's Love Story (1970) for its plot and prose. For Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said that Waller's prose was modeled on Walt Whitman's work, but instead resembled a greeting card. Travers also said that Bridges exists within a tradition of "great romantic crocks" like Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides (1986). The New York Times Magazine found the