Robert James Waller, whose melodramatic novel The Bridges of Madison County, about the love affair of a roaming photographer and a lonely Iowa farm wife, became runaway best seller in the 1990s and formed the basis for a 1995 film starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, died March 10 at his home in Fredericksburg, Texas. He was 77.
A friend, Scott Cawelti, told the Associated Press that the cause was multiple myeloma, a form of cancer.
Waller had written a few essays but had never attempted fiction before The Bridges of Madison County. He was 52 and on leave from his job as a professor of business management when he wrote the book in a feverish two-week period.
“It all just came pouring out,” he told the New York Daily News. “Practically wrote itself. I just typed it. Almost couldn’t keep up with the words. I don’t know where they came from.”
When the novel was published in 1992, expectations were modest. Yet Waller’s 171-page novel found an eager audience through word-of-mouth recommendations and ended up spending 164 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including nearly a full year at No. 1.
Bridges became a publishing phenomenon, selling nearly 6 million copies in the United States in two years. Tens of millions of copies are in print worldwide.
The novel’s plot concerns a photographer, Robert Kincaid, who has come to Madison County, Iowa, in 1965 to photograph its picturesque covered bridges for National Geographic magazine. While there, he asks directions of an Italian-born farm wife named Francesca Johnson, and they embark on a passionate four-day romance while her family is away.
The initial reviews were lukewarm at best. A Chicago Sun-Times critic called it “syrupy, platitudinous pap,” and others lampooned the book’s overwrought emotionalism and wooden prose.
Kincaid, considerate enough to clean the tub after taking a bath, is a Camel-smoking vegetarian smitten by Francesca and her unfulfilled longings.
“I am the highway and a peregrine,” he says, “and all the sails that ever went to sea.”
Francesca responds in kind, saying, “You’re so powerful, it’s frightening.”
The quality of the prose did not put off readers. Instead, they were enraptured by the romantic tale of two adults sharing, if only for a short time, a life-changing passion.
Excerpts of Bridges appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, and television host Oprah Winfrey invited Waller to discuss Bridges on her show, calling it her “favorite book of the year.”
Lanky and silver-haired, Waller looked the part of the handsome wayfaring stranger, going so far as to say, “Of course I’m Robert Kincaid. Just look at me.”
The 1995 film, directed by Eastwood who also starred as Kincaid, was filmed on location in Iowa and pulled in $182 million at the box office. The screenwriters tossed out much of Waller’s portentous prose, opting to let the cinematography and the chiseled faces of Eastwood and Streep carry the story line.
“Forget the book,” read a headline in the Houston Chronicle. “See the movie.”
Bridges fans flocked to southern Iowa to see the places visited by Waller’s imagined characters. (It was the second time in a decade that a first novelist had used Iowa as the setting for an unexpected best seller. W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, about an Iowa farmer with dreams of bringing baseball immortals back to life, was published in 1982.)
Hundreds of weddings were performed under the roofs of Madison County’s covered bridges.
Waller’s second novel, Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend, about another grown-up affair, this time on a college campus, replaced Bridges as No. 1 on the bestseller lists in 1993. He released an album of songs tied into Bridges, and signed so many autographs that he reportedly developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
“People call me up and tell me I have written The Sun Also Rises, that this is a new version of The Old Man and the Sea,” he told the Boston Globe in 1993. “I just say thank you very much. I just wanted to write a story about a lonely man.”
Robert James Waller was born Aug. 1, 1939, in Rockford, Iowa. His father was a wholesale chicken dealer.
“Bobby” Waller, as he was known in his youth, was an all-state basketball star who received an athletic scholarship to the University of Iowa.
“I discovered that I never really did like basketball,” he told Newsday in 1993. “I liked the art and physics of the long-range jump shot.”
He transferred to the University of Northern Iowa, studied mathematics, then received a doctorate in business management from Indiana University. In Indiana he performed folk music in cafes and briefly accompanied Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
He returned to Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, to teach and eventually became the first dean of the university’s school of business administration. He grew disillusioned with teaching and the academic life.
“I looked at them once and shouted, ‘Didn’t anyone here ever want to be an Amazon river captain?’ ” he told People magazine. “They looked at me like I was crazy.”
In 1991, he took the leave of absence that produced The Bridges of Madison County.
Waller moved to a remote ranch in Texas and continued to publish novels, some of which received scathing reviews: New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called Border Music, his 1995 novel, “spectacularly awful.”
His marriage to Georgia Wiedemeier ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, Linda Bow of Fredericksburg; and a daughter from his first marriage.
A stage musical of The Bridges of Madison County appeared on Broadway in 2014 and had a national tour. In 2002, Waller revisited the characters of Bridges in A Thousand Country Roads.
In that book, he wrote: “To hold a grievance against fate accomplishes nothing; things occur without reason, or rhyme, and no more can be said … In the end, there is nothing left except to shoulder whatever you have been handed and to go on.”