@ jrkrideau, Hi. I did try to reach out to the author, who is also the co author of the "Text Mining with R" book (cite: https://www.tidytextmining.com/). I did not hear back from him. However, I saw his co author solve a similar problem elsewhere....can't recall now, but I'll edit in the link here when I can, but anyhow, you just have to set it to find your closest mirror hub, like so:
my_mirror <- "http://mirrors.xmission.com/gutenberg/"
thoreau_text <- gutenberg_works(author == "Thoreau, Henry David") %>%
gutenberg_download(meta_fields = "title", mirror = my_mirror)
Her name is Julia Silge, and she literally wrote the book on tidy design principle based text mining. This was driving me nuts...