There is no author. The text is a compilation, and its sections differ in language, in the geography they assume and in the states they treat as contemporary, which places their composition across a long span, roughly the fourth century BCE through the Han. The mountain books are generally taken to be earliest, the Great Wilds books latest. Whether it originated as a shamanic manual, a ritual geography for imperial administration, or a text written to accompany pictures is disputed and not resolvable from the evidence.
The first fixed form is Han. Liu Xin, working in the imperial library at the turn of the era, presented an edited version and argued for its antiquity, attributing it to Yu the Great and his minister Boyi after the taming of the flood, a claim no modern scholar accepts. The text he passed on was in eighteen books, which is the number that survives, though earlier bibliographic notices give different counts.
The commentary that made the book usable is by Guo Pu, who lived from 276 to 324 CE and was also a poet, diviner and lexicographer. His annotations gloss the vocabulary, identify creatures where he could, and preserve variant readings and lore that would otherwise be lost; every later edition rests on his. Later scholars, notably Bi Yuan in the eighteenth century and Hao Yixing in the nineteenth, produced the critical editions still cited.
Guo Pu also wrote verses on the illustrations, and the received text refers to pictures at several points. Those original images are lost. The elaborate woodcut illustrations found in Ming and Qing editions, which supply most modern visual impressions of the book, were made more than a thousand years later.