Short answers, pulled from the story.
Traditional accounts state that Laozi was born in the 6th-century BC state of Chu during China's Spring and Autumn period. He served as the royal archivist for the Zhou court at Wangcheng, which is modern Luoyang.
Modern scholarship generally regards the Dào Dé Jīng as a collaboration of various writers rather than a single author. The oldest manuscript containing text from the Dào Dé Jīng dates to the late 4th century BC, written on bamboo slips excavated as part of the Guodian Chu Slips.
The name Laozi means Old Master and was never a personal name but an honorific title designed to create an archaic anonymity. A legend ties his birth to a plum tree, and the character Li is a common Chinese surname which also has the meaning plum or plum tree when used as a common noun.
The story of Laozi has taken on strong religious overtones since the Han dynasty, and as Taoism took root, Laozi was worshipped as a god. In later Taoist tradition, Laozi came to be seen as a personification of the Tao and is said to have undergone numerous transformations and taken on guises in various incarnations throughout history.
Due to his traditional name Li Er, Laozi has been venerated as the ancestor of all subsequent Lis, and many clans of the Li family trace their descent to Laozi. This family was known as the Longxi Li lineage, and the emperors of the Tang dynasty belonged to this family.
Many contemporary philosophers have seen Laozi as a proponent of limited government, and the right-libertarian economist Murray Rothbard suggested that Laozi was the first libertarian. Anarchists such as John P. Clark and Ursula K. Le Guin have written about the conjunction between anarchism and Taoism in various ways, highlighting the teachings of Laozi in particular.