Ah, ok.
You are talking about the American fiction writer Philip Roth, who died just last year.
And you say he hung out at FINCH:
Where is this..?
I dug a little more and now I think I understand:
There used to be a women’s college on the upper-east side, Finch College, and it had a high-school.
And the fiction writer Philip Roth used to, errr, hang out there, like Epstein at Dalton.