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 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.