Belvedere College S.J. is a voluntary secondary school for boys in Dublin, Ireland. The school has numerous notable alumni in the arts, politics, sports, science, and business. Alumni and teachers at Belvedere played major roles in modern Irish literature, the standardisation of the Irish language, as well as the Irish independence movement – both the 1916 Rising and the Irish War of Independence. The school's notable alumni and former faculty include two Taoisigh, one Ceann Comhairle, several cabinet ministers, one Blessed, one Cardinal, one Archbishop, one signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, two Supreme Court Justices, one Olympic medallist, thirty Irish international rugby players and numerous notable figures in the world of the arts, academia and business. Belvedere College forms the setting for part of James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.