Data frame with metadata about each author of a Project Gutenberg work. Although the Project Gutenberg raw data also includes metadata on contributors, editors, illustrators, etc., this dataset contains only people who have been the single author of at least one work.
gutenberg_authorsA tbl_df (see tibble or dplyr) with one row for each author, with the columns
Unique identifier for the author that can be used to join with the gutenberg_metadata dataset
The agent_name field from the original metadata
Alias
Year of birth
Year of death
Link to Wikipedia article on the author. If there are multiple, they are "|"-delimited
Character vector of aliases. If there are multiple, they are "/"-delimited
To find the date on which this metadata was last updated,
run attr(gutenberg_authors, "date_updated").
# date last updated
attr(gutenberg_authors, "date_updated")
#> [1] "2025-05-27"