French connection?!?!?!  Watch Link laugh Eddie at the state fair in Des Moines........................

Background[edit]

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 Madison County, Iowa's, covered bridges.^[2] This event, alongside a song Waller wrote years earlier about "the dreams of a woman named Francesca," gave him the idea for the novella,^[2] which was completed in eleven days.^[4] 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.