Alan Gratz always knew a career in teaching lay in his future. He’d learned by example from his mother, an elementary school teacher. Yet when he came across his grandfather’s old Underwood typewriter sitting unused in the garage as a child, the discovery opened up another vocation. He typed up a newspaper with hand-drawn cartoons, which his mother copied on a school mimeograph machine. “I would go up and down the street putting them in people’s mailboxes.” That typewriter now lives in the home office he shares with his wife Wendi, just one of several relics from his path to becoming a bestselling author.
Having spent a year as an eighth grade English teacher, Gratz understands middle schoolers from close observation. “Those three years of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade are a time of learning who you are as a person,” he says via Zoom from his home in Portland, Ore. “They’re still kids. They play kickball, pull pranks on each other. But they’re also having their first serious relationships, starting to drink or experiment with drugs, questioning their place in the larger world.”
Gratz’s first book for that age group, Samurai Shortstop, came out in 2006. His other early titles—baseball, mystery, and fantasy books—did well enough, but a midcareer pivot to World War II thrillers caused his sales to skyrocket. For his 20th title, War Games, due out on October 7, Scholastic is printing 200,000 copies, on top of the nine million copies of other Gratz titles the publisher already has in print.
His seventh book, Prisoner B-3087, based on the life of concentration camp survivor Jack Gruener, marked his entry into the WWII genre in 2013. Scholastic editor Aimee Friedman wanted to adapt Gruener’s story, and when a colleague recommended Gratz, she read his work and says she immediately knew “he would do a wonderful job telling it in a way that was compelling and accessible to young readers.” It was Gratz’s first book with Scholastic, and Friedman adds, “It launched Alan on the journey to author stardom.”
Gratz returned to WWII with 2016’s Projekt 1065, about an Irish boy whose father is Ireland’s ambassador to Nazi Germany. He speaks impeccable German, is a Hitler Youth member, and hides his double life as a spy in Berlin. After the book’s publication, Gratz realized that he could be more intentional about connecting his plots and characters to present-day issues.
Refugee, released in 2017, had what Gratz calls “a little bit more timing and purpose.” He says he braided the stories of a Jewish boy fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, a Cuban girl in 1994, and a Syrian boy in 2015, because their circumstances “were coming at me right at that moment.” He’d already discussed with his editor the story of the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner that in 1939 left Germany carrying 900 Jewish refugees. During a Florida vacation, he stumbled across a beached raft while the Syrian refugee crisis played out on television. The collision of circumstances prompted him to write about both. PW named Refugee one of its best books of 2017, and it remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than four years. In October, Scholastic will publish Refugee: The Graphic Novel, with text adapted by Gratz and illustrations by Syd Fini.
Unlike his imperiled young protagonists, Gratz had a blissfully uneventful childhood in the suburbs of Knoxville, Tenn. His subdivision was surrounded by cow pastures and fields—landscapes Gratz and his friends investigated. Throughout high school, “I wanted to tell stories, but I didn’t know any authors,” Gratz says. “I thought you had to be from New York or Los Angeles to write books.” It was during a senior year internship at the Knoxville News Sentinel that he realized that journalism wasn’t for him.
Attending the University of Tennessee’s College Scholars Program enabled him to concentrate on a thesis-level project—in his case,
a book. “I went all in on fiction writing,” he says. He earned both undergrad and graduate degrees there. “I learned how to write but not how to make any money at it,” he admits.
Gratz completed two novels during his years teaching. “I sent them out and got back good rejection letters,” he says. “I was getting close.” At the same time, impending parenthood prompted a reassessment of the future. “Wendi, in words that will live in infamy, said, ‘You’ve wanted to write since you were a kid. Quit your job, be a stay-at-home dad. Write another book, sell it.’ ” Just before his daughter’s first birthday, Gratz sold Samurai Shortstop.
In War Games, 13-year-old Evie Harris competes in the 1936 Berlin Olympics—an event that has fascinated Gratz for years. “Jesse Owens, obviously, is the huge story,” he says of the Black track-and-field star who won four gold medals. “And Hitler’s up in the stands watching all of this. And we’re three years away from World War II.”
Sports books, he knows, often fall back on a scrappy underdog who comes from behind and wins the big game. To avoid that, War Games is a twist on “going for the gold”—a heist story in which Evie and two other Olympians steal gold from the German Reichsbank. Gratz praises his Friedman for helping him shape a tight narrative: “Aimee and I worked hard to identify the heart of the story, and cut away enough so that it’s really obvious—and apparent to the young readers.”
Friedman, in turn, says Gratz “never sugarcoats the harsh realities,” yet makes intense topics relatable and inspiring. “His young characters all have agency. The secret sauce of Alan’s books is fast-paced, cinematic storytelling with insightful takes on social themes that speak to kids today.”
Gratz says he believes that WWII stories resonate so deeply with middle school readers because “there’s not a lot of ambiguity: we were on the side of right, fought with others against an evil, and we won. Middle school readers have a strong sense of justice. When you show them something wrong, they’ll say, Well, why can’t we fix it? They look at the Holocaust and ask, How could people be that awful to each other? But also, how could we have let this happen?”
In some ways, Gratz explains, he writes for himself; as a kid he was unaware of issues that are now the focus of his writing. But in
high school, he started asking himself what he really believes. “If I’d had my own books back in middle school, maybe I would have come around to knowing who I am earlier.”
Before Covid, in-person school visits nearly took over Gratz’s life: he’d spend up to 200 nights away from home and family each year. Full days meant staying up until 5 a.m. writing to meet deadlines. Exhausted after a decade, he needed a change. Today, he concentrates on virtual presentations.
What hasn’t changed is the message behind Gratz’s books. “I want to teach empathy,” he says. “I want people to understand the viewpoints of others, and that we are better together than apart. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that 10 years ago. It took me writing a few books—and coming to that theme every time, naturally, as a writer—to understand.”
Linda Lowen is a writer, editor, and theater reviewer living in Syracuse, N.Y.
