Larry Harvey, the guru-like driving force behind Burning Man, the globally celebrated anti-establishment, anti-consumerist festival that he and a friend began 32 years ago on a San Francisco beach, died on Saturday at a hospital in San Francisco. He was 70.

His death was announced on the Burning Man website. Mr. Harvey had a stroke on April 4.

Burning Man is now a revered weeklong annual event that takes place in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, north of Reno, but there is no firm consensus on whether it is a spiritual retreat, performance art, a music festival, a construction project or just an excuse to party in the middle of scorching heat and dust storms.

New York Times writers have described it as, or compared it to, a “weeklong cyberhippie carnival,” a “fringe culturefest,” “a hallucinogenic state fair,” “a full-scale countercultural declaration of independence,” “the internet made flesh” and “the Whitney Biennial reimagined as a rave party.”