increased environmental awareness, perhaps The Grapes of Wrath’s most resonant and radical lesson is that saving a bioregion or ecosystem requires the kind of gesture symbolized in eco-hero Casy’s sacrifice and Rose of Sharon’s gift of breast milk to a starving man—that is, gestures (affective or otherwise) that dramatize a way of giving that requires full commitment to a realm larger than the self. In its polemical register and evangelical tone, in its trajectory from I to We, in its indictment of a “crime . . . that goes beyond denunciation,” The Grapes of Wrath is at once an elegy for and a
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