From 1975 to 1985, he was the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia.

Ehrenpreis was considered an expert on Jonathan Swift and also wrote on contemporary American literature.

[5] In Literary Meaning and Augustan Values, he argued that the concept of organic form should not be applied to English literature of the 18th century.

[8][9] In 1984, he wrote a strong critique of Edward Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic in The New York Review of Books.

[10] Ehrenpreis died on July 3, 1985, in Münster, then in West Germany, after a fall.