A solution is presented for the elastic stress intensity factors at the tip of a slightly curved or kinked two-dimensional crack. The solution is accurate to first order in the deviation of the crack surface from a straight line and is carried out by perturbation procedures analogous to those of Banichuk [1] and Goldstein and Salganik [2, 3]. Comparison with exact solutions for circular arc cracks and straight cracks with kinks indicates that the first order solution is numerically accurate for considerable deviations from straightness. The solution is applied to fromulate an equation for the path of crack growth, on the assumption that the path is characterized by pure Mode I conditions (i.e., K II=0) at the advancing tip. This method confirms the dependence of the stability, under Mode I loading, of a straight crack path on the sign of the non-singular stress term, representing tensile stress T acting parallel to the crack, in the Irwin-Williams expansion of the crack tip field. The straight path is shown to be stable under Mode I loading for T 0.