Michael Straight
American writer (1916-2004)
Michael Whitney Straight (September 1, 1916 – January 4, 2004) was an American magazine publisher, novelist, patron of the arts, a member of the prominent Whitney family, and a confessed spy for the KGB.
Early life
Straight was born in New York City, the son of Willard Dickerman Straight (1880–1918), an investment banker who died in Michael's infancy, and Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887–1968), a philanthropist. Straight was educated at Lincoln School in New York City and, after his mother's remarriage to Leonard Knight Elmhirst (1893–1974), in England at his family's Dartington Hall, followed by studies at the London School of Economics. His siblings were racing driver Whitney Straight and Academy Award–winning actress Beatrice Straight.
Straight's maternal grandparents were Flora Payne and William Collins Whitney (1841–1904), the United States Secretary of the Navy during the first Cleveland administration. Flora was the daughter of Senator Henry B. Payne of Ohio and sister of Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne.
Career
While a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the mid-1930s, Straight became a Communist Party member and a part of an intellectual secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. Straight worked for the Soviet Union as part of a spy ring whose members included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and KGB recruiter Anthony Blunt. A document from Soviet archives of a report that Blunt made in 1943 to the KGB states, "As you already know the actual recruits whom I took were Michael Straight".
Straight finished third in the 1934 South African Grand Prix, a race dominated by his brother Whitney.
After returning to the United States in 1937, Straight worked as a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was on the payroll of the Department of the Interior.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Michael Straight” is american writer (1916-2004). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Michael, Straight and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3308543. The first chronological checks are 1916, 2004, 1880 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Straight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.