Bridges of Madison County author Robert James Waller dies

Robert James Waller, whose best-selling, bittersweet 1992 romance novel The Bridges of Madison County was turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and later into a soaring Broadway musical, has died in Texas, according to a long-time friend. He was 77.

Scott Cawelti, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, said that Waller died early Friday at his home in Fredericksburg, Texas. He had been fighting multiple myeloma, a form of cancer.

In Bridges, a literary phenomenon which Waller famously wrote in 11 days, the roving National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid spends four days taking pictures of bridges and also romancing Francesca Johnson, a war bride from Italy married to a no-nonsense Iowa farmer. One famous line from the book reads: “The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out but I’m glad I had them.”

Waller’s novel reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list and stayed on it for over three years, longer than any work of fiction since The Robe, a novel about Jesus’ crucifixion published in the early 1950s. The Eastwood-directed 1995 movie grossed $182 million worldwide.

Watch: The Bridges of Madison County heartbreak scene

Many critics made fun of Bridges, calling it sappy and cliche-ridden. The Independent newspaper said of the central romantic pair “it is hard to believe in, or to like, either of them.” (Publishers Weekly was more charitable, calling the book, “quietly powerful and thoroughly credible.”)