Einstein's quest for unification

In the last 30 years of his life, Albert Einstein sought to find a unified field theory. For Einstein and his few unification-minded colleagues the big issue was to unify general relativity with Maxwell's electrodynamics. However, even Einstein admitted that his unification papers were not always ground breaking. One reason for this maybe was that he was simply ahead of his time, since even if he had been following contemporary physics more closely, the information available before his death was probably insufficient to make significant progress in unification. (Edited abstract)