Alan Gratz
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free Alan Gratz trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Alan Gratz writes the kind of historical thrillers that get passed around a classroom until the covers fall off. Refugee, Prisoner B-3087, Grenade, Allies and Ground Zero drop young heroes into the hardest moments of the past century, and the man behind them turns out to be just as entertaining as his plots: a costume builder, a comic book reader and a former teacher with a very firm opinion about dinner. This quiz mixes fun facts about the author with questions on his books. Expect his childhood ambitions, his earliest attempts at writing, his favorite teams and his daily routine, alongside the characters, settings and true stories behind his best-known novels, plus a few surprises from his early career on stage and screen. It is written for students reading Gratz at school, teachers and librarians planning a book club or an author study, and families who have read the novels together. The opening questions are friendly, the later ones reward real fans, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before he turned to writing, what did Refugee author Alan Gratz jokingly say he first dreamed of becoming?
A Jedi master
A Jedi master was the original plan, he says, but he could not master the Force. He settled for writing stories and newspaper articles all through middle and high school.
Q 02Which food does Alan Gratz compare to breathing air when fans ask what his favorite thing to eat is?
Pizza
Pizza is so plainly his favorite, he says, that naming it is like naming air as his favorite thing to breathe. His official bio even lists eating it among his pastimes.
Q 03Which cartoon character did Alan Gratz build as a sixteen-foot costume, so big it needed a rented van?
Totoro
Totoro towered over the 2012 DragonCon Masquerade in Atlanta and won Best Cartoon Characters, with Gratz's daughter Jo on stage beside him as Satsuki.
Q 04Which real ship, turned away from Cuba in 1939, carries Josef's family in Alan Gratz's novel Refugee?
MS St. Louis
MS St. Louis is where the whole novel began: Gratz noticed that books, films and even an opera had told its story, but nothing had been written about it for young readers.
Q 05In Alan Gratz's Refugee, which instrument does Isabel trade for gasoline so her family's boat can leave Cuba?
Trumpet
Trumpet for fuel is the deal that gets the engine started, and at the end of the novel her great-uncle Guillermo gives her a new one.
Q 06In Alan Gratz's spy thriller Projekt 1065, the title is the real code name for which Nazi secret weapon?
A jet plane
A jet plane, the Messerschmitt Me 262, grew out of the project and became the world's first operational jet fighter. Gratz kept the German spelling, with a K, for his title.
Q 07In Alan Gratz's Captain America graphic novel, the Ghost Army is a real American unit that fooled the Axis using what?
Inflatable tanks
Inflatable tanks, giant loudspeakers and fake radio transmissions were the tools of a unit staffed by artists, actors and sound engineers.
Q 08Alan Gratz calls The League of Seven his favorite of his own books; which real inventor is its evil genius?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison wakes a giant monster in a swamp by experimenting with electricity, a forbidden science in the novel's steampunk America.
Q 09In Alan Gratz's Grenade, Hideki is handed two grenades on the day American troops land on which island?
Okinawa
Okinawa is where the Japanese Army pulls Hideki and the other boys out of middle school, telling him one grenade is for an American soldier and the other is for himself.
Q 10In Alan Gratz's Ban This Book, where does fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger hide her secret library of banned titles?
Her locker
Her locker library was inspired by a viral internet tale about a schoolgirl doing the same thing, a story later revealed to be a hoax.
Q 11Which Tennessee city, home of the 1982 World's Fair, is the hometown of bestselling author Alan Gratz?
Knoxville
Knoxville is where he was born and raised, went to Webb School, and stayed on for both of his university degrees.
Q 12Which West Coast city did Tennessee-born author Alan Gratz make his home after years living mostly on the East Coast?
Portland
Portland, Oregon is where he lives with his family, and his fandom moved with him: he backs both the Timbers and the Thorns soccer clubs.
Q 13Before writing full time, Alan Gratz taught eighth graders which subject, the job he says he would still be doing?
English
English was his subject; he holds a graduate degree in teaching it, on top of an undergraduate degree specializing in creative writing.
Q 21In Alan Gratz's Prisoner B-3087, Yanek is a ten-year-old boy in which Polish city when the Nazis invade?
Kraków
Kraków becomes a ghetto where Yanek's family spends three years crammed into shared apartments, before he is sent to the first of his ten camps.
Q 22In Alan Gratz's Projekt 1065, a boy spy inside the Hitler Youth is the son of which neutral country's ambassador?
Ireland
Ireland stayed neutral in the war, and Gratz learned that its diplomats in Berlin were really working as spies, which gave him a hero who was not a Nazi.
Q 23Which character from Josef's storyline in Alan Gratz's Refugee turns up decades later sheltering Mahmoud's family?
His sister Ruthie
Q 14Asked on his website's FAQ for a dream job outside writing novels, which career does Alan Gratz name?
Game show host
Game show host is the dream, and he adds that he also wishes he could draw comics.
Q 15Which Major League Baseball team does Alan Gratz, author of The Brooklyn Nine, list as his favorite?
Los Angeles Dodgers
Los Angeles Dodgers top his list of teams, which also includes the German soccer club St. Pauli. His novel follows one family of fans back to the club's Brooklyn days.
Q 16Alan Gratz's Ground Zero pairs a boy inside the World Trade Center on 9/11 with a girl living in which country?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan is home to eleven-year-old Reshmina, who stumbles upon a wounded American soldier named Taz when a battle erupts in her village.
Q 17In Alan Gratz's Heroes, comic-loving friends Frank and Stanley are touring the battleship USS Utah during which attack?
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor ends the boys' daydreams of creating their own superhero in the mold of Superman and Wonder Woman, and leaves them fighting to make their way home.
Q 18Alan Gratz's mystery Something Rotten, set in Denmark, Tennessee, retells which Shakespeare play as a modern murder?
Hamlet
Hamlet supplied both the plot and the detective's name: Gratz liked how practical the prince's friend Horatio was and borrowed him.
Q 19Which science-fiction franchise did Alan Gratz write for in 2012, in a novel where cadets hunt each other with sporks?
Star Trek
Star Trek got the Gratz treatment in a Starfleet Academy novel: Cadet Kirk plays along for fun, while Bones McCoy joins in to get closer to a girl.
Q 20Alan Gratz's Prisoner B-3087 is based on the true story of which Holocaust survivor, whom Gratz met in New York?
Jack Gruener
Jack Gruener and his wife took the story to the publisher themselves, and Gratz was halfway through the first draft before the two spent an afternoon together at a Holocaust museum.
His sister Ruthie survives because Josef gives himself up to the Nazis in her place, and as an old woman she takes in the Syrian family in Germany.
Q 24On a beach holiday while planning Refugee, what did Alan Gratz find washed ashore that reshaped the whole novel?
An abandoned raft
An abandoned raft with nobody on board, probably from Cuba, made him ask why he was writing only about refugees of seventy-five years ago.
Q 25Alan Gratz's Ban This Book was itself pulled from school libraries in 2024 by a county board in which state?
Florida
Florida's Indian River County banned it in a 3–2 vote that overruled the district's own review committee, a twist Gratz called incredibly ironic.
Q 26In Alan Gratz's War Games, thirteen-year-old American Evie Harris goes to the 1936 Berlin Olympics to compete in what?
Gymnastics
Gymnastics is her ticket to Berlin alongside teammates like Jesse Owens, but she ends up mixed up in a plot to steal Nazi gold.
Q 27In Alan Gratz's Fantasy Baseball, which Wizard of Oz character takes the mound as pitcher for the Oz Cyclones?
Dorothy
Dorothy pitches while a flying monkey patrols the outfield and a toad plays shortstop, an idea that began with joke jerseys made for Gratz's daughter.
Q 28In Alan Gratz's thriller Code of Honor, football hero Kamran Smith dreams of following his brother to which academy?
West Point
West Point is the plan until his older brother Darius appears on national TV accused of terrorism, and Kamran sets out to clear his name.
Q 29In Alan Gratz's Samurai Shortstop, 16-year-old Toyo survives a punishing first year at a school in which city?
Tokyo
Tokyo in 1890 is the setting, where Toyo learns to blend bushido, the samurai way of the warrior, with an American sport his father despises.
Q 30Alan Gratz's first book, a fifth-grade spoof of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, said real kids don't eat what?
Spinach
Spinach got the blame in Real Kids Don't Eat Spinach, and he kept writing stories and newspaper articles right through high school.