Anton Szandor LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey on 11 April 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. His own accounts of his early life, including claims of work as a circus and carnival performer, an organist and a police photographer, have proven difficult for biographers to verify independently and are now generally treated with caution as part of a self constructed public persona rather than settled biographical fact. What is well documented is that by the early 1960s he was holding informal lectures and gatherings on magic and the occult at his San Francisco home, drawing a following interested in his showmanship as much as his ideas.
On Walpurgisnacht, 30 April 1966, LaVey formally founded the Church of Satan, declaring what he called the Year One of the Age of Satan, and shaved his head in a gesture he said echoed older traditions of executioners and strongmen. He led the Church for the rest of his life, cultivating a public image as its high priest and its most visible spokesman for a deliberately transgressive, individualist philosophy. He died in San Francisco on 29 October 1997.
Biographers who have attempted to independently verify LaVey's pre-1966 claims, including his stated employment history and some family background details, have found several points where his own telling does not match available records, a pattern of self mythologizing that LaVey himself never fully clarified and that his later followers and critics continue to debate. What is not in dispute is the organizational fact that mattered most: by the mid 1960s he had built a genuine following in San Francisco around his lectures and rituals, sufficient to sustain a formally founded church.